


No Wealth, No Land, No Silver Nor Gold

by NomDeGuerre



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Supernatural Elements, Darcy's not human, F/M, Gen, I'm with you, Mythical Beings & Creatures, To the end of the line, Wingfic, Winter Soldier divergent (partially), i guess, supernatural Darcy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-20
Updated: 2016-09-21
Packaged: 2018-07-16 06:02:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 12
Words: 40,935
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7255420
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NomDeGuerre/pseuds/NomDeGuerre
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Humans have a saying “We enter this world alone, and we leave it alone.”  But that’s not exactly true.<br/>There are many words for them: reapers, valkyries, psychopomps...  This one calls herself Darcy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This was supposed to be a short story, an exercise to familiarize myself with writing in a new fandom. It certainly didn't stay that way. It's at 16K words and counting.  
> A couple notes before we begin. First is that I'm only partly following Bucky's backstory from the movies. I changed some things because I had scenes in my head I wanted to show that didn't follow the canon. I think the heart of Bucky's still there, though. Second, I also changed Darcy a bit, beyond just making her a supernatural being. The changes follow from her supernatural origins, but they mean that she's more solemn, less snarky, than she's shown as in the movies. I hope the changes aren't too egregious, and that you all can enjoy the story for what it is.  
> The title comes from the delightfully dark song "Oh Death". The lyrics are so creepy, I love it. I particularly like the version sung in the show Supernatural; I like the singer's voice and the accompanying music better than in the other versions (even though it only uses a fraction of the lyrics).

She can’t remember having a name before the one she’d given herself.  She can’t remember where she’d come from, or who had set her on her task, but she knows how to do what she does like it is a part of her.  And maybe it is.  There certainly is no evidence to the contrary.

She doesn’t know where she first hears the name Darcy.  Maybe it had been the name of one of the souls she’d Shepherded.  She doesn’t know where she’d heard the term ‘shepherd’ either, but it’s the softest, kindest way to speak of what she does.  And she wants it to be that—soft.  Kind.  The way they die isn’t always, especially not now.

There are so many people in the world, and not all of them are dying in this war, but so many of the souls Darcy Shepherds are.  Maybe whatever guides her to the dying prefers to give her the soldiers, the ones dying in mud and metal, the ones who sob and scream and hurt so much.  Maybe it is because she wants to be there for them that she is.  These almost-children, not-quite-men who hold hands to wounds as if it will keep in their blood and their organs, and cry out for their mothers.  They don’t want to die alone.  Darcy doesn’t let them.

She gets the softer ones, still, sometimes.  An old man dying in his sleep, gently.  A woman, surrounded by her family, no regrets, filled with love.

Darcy doesn’t know where they go, doesn’t know where the doors she can open lead.  If she’d ever been through them, she doesn’t remember it.  It sometimes bothers her, all of the blanks that appear when she thinks a little closer about what she is.  But she can see, sometimes, relief on the faces of the dying, when they realize she’s there.  She means something to them.  There is something in that, that… makes it all okay, sort of.  Maybe they just recognize her as someone—thing—that will make the pain stop.  Maybe they are religious and think she’s an emissary of their god, or gods.

Sometimes they ask.

She doesn’t know the answer.

* * *

Darcy stands in chaos, bullets popping and mortars whistling around her.  The boy at her feet is gasping for breath, red roses of blood blooming on his chest.  He tries to call for a medic, but the shrapnel stops him, his breath whistling weakly into the air.  His hands pat weakly at the wounds, face twisting with pain and terror.

He sobs, and Darcy kneels beside him.  His hand burns hot in hers (she wonders if he can feel her touch, what it feels like if he can).  She can feel him slipping more and more into her grasp, life bleeding out into the mud.  His sobbing breaths grow weaker, eyes rolling in his head.

She thinks that, as they draw closer to death, the souls she Shepherds become more able to see her, detect her presence.  Sometimes she sings to them, as they slip from life.  She sings now, a wordless croon.  The soldier—now clutching desperately at her hand—slowly quiets, his face turning toward her.  His eyes meet hers.  She can see the moment he sees her, quickly followed by the moment he dies.

His soul is bright, warm, and also neither of those things.  Darcy gathers it to her, cradling it in her hands like a wish.  She closes her eyes, and the door within her opens, the soldier’s soul the key to unlock it.  The warmth and the brightness flare, then vanish, and the door closes.

Darcy stands, and finds herself beside the next gasping, choking, dying soldier.  He dies with his lips forming the words of a prayer, over and over again.

* * *

There are always people dying.  There are billions of people in the world, being born, being killed, living and dying.  If Darcy has ever had a break from Shepherding, she doesn’t remember it.  The instant she finishes Shepherding one soul, she finds herself with the next fading life.  This is how it has always been.  It’s all she knows.

There are others like her; other Shepherds.  She sees them, sometimes—often, when it’s a battlefield she’s called to—but they never speak.  She can never ask them “Did  _ you _ give yourself a name, too?” “Do you know where we came from?” “Do you know where the souls go?”  She wants to.

Darcy is self-aware, but she has no identity.  She hadn’t had a name before she’d given herself one.  She knows nothing beyond her work.  There is no mother or father or birthday or childhood or anything to give her an anchor for ‘self’.  She is ‘Darcy’ but  _ who _ is Darcy?

She wonders why she’d given herself a name, wonders how long she’d gone without one before.  What was she before her memories start?

Memories are such fragile things, she finds.  Pieces can be lost so easily, unknowingly.  She clings to hers with claws sunk in, desperate, but she knows that the edges are blurring around her first memory, time rubbing at it, eroding it.  It terrifies her that one day it will be gone entirely.  What happens to her if she forgets everything?  She doesn’t even know if she existed before her memories; will she exist if they all fade?

* * *

Snow howls around her, and she looks up and up and up to a hostile grey sky that seems so far away.  Dark stones jut like ragged teeth from the snow that lays heavy on the steep cliffs.  She stands at the bottom of a ravine in ice and snow.

Someone is breathing thickly, wetly, nearby.  She looks down.  A soldier, she recognizes, though his clothing is not quite a uniform.  He is sprawled on the ground, snow around him untouched.  Darcy glances up the cliffs again.

“You an angel?”  Darcy looks down at the man, and he’s looking at her, watching her, seeing her.  His eyes are a shade lighter than the blue of his jacket.  She comes closer.

“Some people call me that,” she tells him, what she always says when they ask.  There’s blood—vivid against the snow—on him and around him, the worst of it haloing the ruin of his left arm.  The limb stops at the elbow, flesh ragged, the white of bone visible.  It looks like the forearm had been torn off at the joint.  The flesh writhes as if it is trying to heal, but he’s bleeding out too fast—he’ll die before it can heal enough to matter.

“’M I dyin’ then?” he asks on a cough.  There’s blood at his lips.  Darcy kneels next to him.

“Yes,” she admits.  “But you don’t have to be afraid.”

He laughs breathlessly.  “Not afraid for  _ me _ , doll.  Worried ‘bout my buddies.  They’re still fightin’.”

Darcy takes his remaining hand in hers.  “They might die.  They might not.  If they do, they won’t be alone either.”

“You gonna be with them?”

“Me, or one of the others like me.”

“Mmn.” His face is pale.  It won’t be long.

“Do you want me to sing to you?” Darcy asks.  His lips twitch.

“Gorgeous dame singin’ me to heaven?” He exhales a weak laugh.  “Not dumb enough to refuse.”

She smiles at him, but his attention wavers from her, his face tightening.  “Someone’s comin’.”

Darcy looks up, blinks.  There is a group of people—maybe a dozen—making their way through the ravine.  “Your friends?”

“No,” he says.  She looks down at him.  He sounds afraid.  “No.  No, no, no!”

“What is it?  Who are they?”

“No, please no.  I’m not going back there.  No.  Let me die!” He clutches her hand.  “Kill me.  Kill me.”

“I-I can’t… I’m not…”

“Hello again, Sergeant,” says an accented voice above them.  Darcy looks up into a thin, smirking face.  Her soldier is wheezing, panicking.  The man gestures, and three of the other men swarm.  Darcy is driven back, watching with wide eyes as they wind a tourniquet around his arm and start an IV.  “Do you remember me?  I admit that I only played a support role in your improvement before… but Doctor Zola is unavailable.  Your friends have seen to that.”

“F-fuck you,” Darcy’s soldier breathes, before choking on a scream as he’s moved onto a stretcher.

“Don’t worry, Sergeant.  We have you.” The thin man’s words are less reassuring than ominous.  Darcy wrings her hands together.  There’s nothing she can do.  She is not truly tangible in this world; she can only touch the dead and the near-dead.  And it’s not that she is touching their corporeal self, but rather the soul within their flesh—and then their soul outside their flesh.  She can’t stop them taking him.  And she can’t take him herself because he’s not dead.

When they load him into a rugged tank-like transport, she is brought along with, still bound to him.  She’s supposed to Shepherd his soul, but they won’t let him die.  She’s as captive as he is, trapped in the bright sterile room they wheel him into and forced to bear witness to the horrifying things they do to him in the name of saving his life.

“James B-Buchanan Barnes,” he gasps through the pain, his only response to anything they say to him.  “S-sergeant.  Three-two-five-five-s-s-seven-oh-th—”

The words break away into a scream.  Darcy has seen surgery before, has Shepherded those who have been unlucky on the table.  But  _ they _ don’t die in pain, they slip away under the blanket of drugs.  These white-coated men haven’t given her soldier—James Buchanan Barnes—anything, forcing him to remain conscious and fully aware, feeling them pull together the remnants of his left arm, cut away what can’t be salvaged.  Stitches march along the contours of his flesh, ugly and stark against his sick-pale skin.  The liquid that drips into him from an IV is blood and… and something else that feels wrong against her eyes.  She can’t look at it, gaze sliding away with a flinch every time she tries.

He’s shuddering and mumbling, eyes unfocused.  They are buzzing around him busily, checking pulse and blood pressure and double-checking the soundness of the straps keeping him on the unforgiving metal table.  He twitches feebly each time their shadows fall over him, weak attempts to escape the pain their presence heralds.

“Put him under,” says the one in charge.  They have names sewn into their white coats.  His says ‘Schürer’.  “The Americans are in Kapfenberg; we need to move to a new facility.”

Another man—Lehmann—retrieves a syringe.  James Buchanan Barnes shivers when the liquid hits his veins, then slowly quiets, muscles going lax and eyes sliding shut.

“Move him,” says Schürer.  Darcy blinks once and finds herself elsewhere.

* * *

“Fine, but then you get Rogers on your team!” the child sneers the name like it’s a bad word, and the small group of boys glance at the smallest of their number—a tiny blond boy with knobby knees and hollow cheeks.  The boy scowls.  There’s a hint of an old, mostly-healed shiner around one of his eyes.

“Good!  Then we’ll win for sure!” proclaims a dark-haired boy loudly, before seizing Rogers by one arm and towing him along.  “We’ll take field first!”

Darcy finds herself keeping pace with the pair as they walk a little ways down the street before stopping and turning to face the other children, who are arranging themselves in preparation for some sort of game.  The brunet boy turns to the blond.  “You can catch the ball if it comes to you, right?”

His face tightens with insult.  “Yeah, I can!”

“Okay,” the brunet says, ignoring the other’s combative tone.  “You can play outfield.”

Darcy has never seen this game before, and she wonders why she’s here.  Is one of these boys meant to die?  She’s never not had a soul to Shepherd before.  She thinks of what had happened with James Buchanan Barnes, and wonders if she is broken.  She’d failed to Shepherd him, so maybe now she can’t do it right at all.

“What’s your name?”

“Steve,” says the thin blond boy.  “Rogers.”

“I’m Bucky.  C’mon Steve, we’re gonna beat the socks off these guys.”

She doesn’t understand.   There’s nobody to Shepherd, only these boys playing their game.  She looks up and down the street, confused.  There aren’t too many people out, at least on this particular street.  A milkman hops into his truck and trundles off, a newspaper crier down at the corner is a distant shout.  She shouldn’t be here, if there isn’t a soul for her to Shepherd.  So, why…?

There’s a crack as a boy hits the ball soundly, and then a crash as the ball smashes through the plate-glass window of a shop ( _ Rundiman’s Shoe Repair and Hat Blocking _ ).  The children freeze in place in horror, and the shopkeeper boils out of the door, furious.  His gaze falls on the closest child, the brunet boy, and his voice rises: “James Barnes!  I should have known it was you, you little hooligan!”

Darcy’s gaze snaps down to the boy, suddenly seeing it in his face, and in his soul… She recognizes him… 

* * *

A loud, ragged gasp fills her ears and she looks down at the convulsing body of James Buchanan Barnes.  The straps across his chest, hips, shoulders, wrists, and ankles keep him on the table and prevent him from dislodging the needle tucked into the crook of his intact elbow.  The liquid crawling viscously through it burns her gaze again, and taints the air with an acid-sharp scent.  It makes Barnes’ muscles snap tight, would have bowed his body into a pained curve like a man dying of tetanus if not for the restraints.  A terrible noise scrapes from his throat, muffled by the guard between his teeth, as bruises bloom under the thick material of the straps and foaming saliva flecks the corners of his grimacing mouth.  His eyes are rolled back, showing only the whites.

Darcy sobs once in horror, pressing her palms against her own eyes.  She has never witnessed suffering that she can’t deliver the victim from.  She is supposed to be able to Shepherd his soul, stop the pain he’s feeling.  She’s not meant to watch this, be trapped like this.  And he’s not supposed to be trapped, either.  He is  _ supposed _ to have died.  If it hadn’t been his time, she never would have appeared to him.

Two men in white lab coats watch their jerking, twitching patient, impassive and with no trace of compassion.  Darcy screams at them.  “Why are you  _ doing  _ this?”

They don’t answer, of course.  They can’t see her or hear her.

“Serum B-880 induced severe muscular contraction, similar to previous formulations,” says one clinically, marking something on his clipboard.  His coat bears the name ‘Wasselowski’.

“Time of healing from capillary hematoma is accelerated,” observes the other, Opel.  Wasselowski checks his wristwatch.

“Apply peptide solution and muscle relaxant.”

The restraints creak as Barnes slowly quiets.  Darcy can see a sliver of blue iris under his drooping eyelids.  His pupils are blown wide and unfocused.  His head twitches as Opel pulls the mouthguard out, dropping it on a nearby tray of instruments.  Wasselowski takes his pulse and checks his blood pressure, noting them down, then checks the level of liquid left in the IV bag.

Darcy presses herself into the wall, hugging her arms around her.  “Please,” she whispers, not knowing who she’s speaking to.  “Please.  Why am I here?”

“Sergeant Barnes,” says Wasselowski, and Darcy shivers, trying to shrink even further away into the wall.  “Sergeant Barnes.”

He slaps Barnes’ cheek, rocking his head against the table.  Barnes mumbles, but it’s nothing coherent, just a garbled soup of syllables.  Wasselowski slaps him again, harder.  “Wake up, Sergeant.”

“Fffug’uu,” Barnes slurs, earning himself another slap.  His expression tightens with anger and pain, eyes squeezing shut.

“Do you know where you are, Sergeant?”

“Fuck you,” he says, clearer, but still obviously out of it.  His voice is thready, and his eyes can’t focus on the doctor looming over him.  Sighing, Wasselowski turns to gesture to Opel, who tears the IV needle from Barnes’ arm roughly.  Barnes flinches, blood trickling down his pale arm.  He becomes a little more present, eyes starting to track.

“You have the typical American bravado, Sergeant Barnes.  But it will not help you here.”

“But it... gets under your skin, right?” Barnes manages with a weak smirk.

“A curious turn of phrase,” Wasselowski muses, picking up a scalpel from the tray of instruments.  Darcy makes a tiny, frightened noise, and Barnes hears her, eyes flicking toward her and widening in surprise.  She presses her hands against her mouth.  “I think you remember the tests Doctor Zola administered, to test the efficacy of the serum he gave you?  I’m afraid we’ll have to repeat them.  You see, he had only progressed to stage one of your treatments…”

A muscle in Barnes’ jaw pops into stark relief as he clenches his teeth, but he doesn’t verbally respond.

“You may comfort yourself in knowing that the pain will be temporary, but the advances we will achieve here will change the world forever.”

He brings the scalpel up to Barnes’ skin.  Opel scribbles at his clipboard with a pencil.  Darcy starts crying.

It takes an hour before Barnes starts screaming.  He stares at Darcy and begs: “Kill me.  Just kill me.  Please.”

She can’t kill him.  She can’t even touch him anymore; her hands slide right through him like they’re shadows and illusion.  She sobs: “I can’t.  I can’t.”

The doctors think he’s talking to them.  They won’t kill him, either.  He is their subject, their most successful to date, too valuable to simply cull.  They don’t kill him, but they keep hurting him.

Several hours later, he finally passes out.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I noticed a plot inconsistency in Winter Soldier, when we see the flashback to Bucky waking up in enemy hands after his fall. He's supposedly found by Russian soldiers, but somehow gets back to HYDRA scientists, and specifically Zola. But at that point, Zola has been captured by the SSR (that was the result of the train mission), and is a prisoner. Even after Operation Paperclip, he was made part of an American organization, and that was when tensions between USA and USSR were rising. It doesn't make sense for Zola to be physically present in the USSR while Bucky was made into the Winter Soldier. I can't suspend my disbelief that much. So, in my story, he's indirectly involved in the Winter Soldier Program- the scientists/doctors are following his plan, but he's not there.

“I’m sorry, Bucky, but Steve is sick and can’t play today.”  The woman is blonde, with a tired face and a voice that has the merest suggestion of an Irish lilt.  The boy standing at the door in front of her is gangly in the way children are when they’re on the edge of a growth spurt.

“Is it his asthma?” he asks, eyes clear and blue.  He looks so different from the man Darcy had just watched be tortured into unconsciousness—different in ways that go far beyond simple age.

The woman sighs.  “Pneumonia.  It’s very contagious, so you can’t see him, I’m afraid.”

James Buchanan Barnes—called Bucky—looks mutinous.  The woman touches his head gently.  “I’m serious now, lad.  I don’t want you getting sick, too.  Your Ma wouldn’t be happy.”

“N’ Steve would feel guilty,” James says grudgingly.  He looks up at Steve’s mother.  “When will he get better?”

She hesitates.  “Come back in a week.  He may still be tired then, but he won’t be contagious.”

“Okay.  Thanks, Mrs. Rogers,” he shifts like he’s about to take off, but hesitates.  “Can you tell Steve I hope he gets better soon?”

“Of course, Bucky.  Take care.”

His footsteps thud on the wood stairway down to the street, and an old man’s voice yells “No running!” at him from inside the apartment at the end of the building.  Darcy follows easily, though she never increases her pace beyond an easy walk.  She moves through the world, not in it.

She follows James to his home.  He slams into the apartment with the force of a hurricane, making a bee-line for the back, where the bedrooms are.  The room he enters is too small for the four beds within—and two of them are short, narrow trundle beds.

James scrambles onto one bed so he can reach a shelf on the wall, and takes down a chipped, lid-less mason jar.  There is a handful of pennies rattling in the bottom.  James upends the jar into his palm, closing his fingers over the coins.  He leaves the jar behind and exits the room.  Clutching his prize, he goes into the kitchen, where a woman with dark hair curled artfully around her face is scrubbing potatoes in the sink.

“Hi Ma,” he says.  She looks up, smiling.  Darcy can see the love clear on her face, and something within her aches.

“Jamie darling,” the woman says.  “I thought you were going to play with Steven?”

“He’s sick,” James tells her solemnly.  “I wanna get him somethin’ to cheer him up.”

“That’s a fine idea, sweetheart.”

He lays the coins in his hand on the table.  “I’ve got five pennies.”  

He narrows his eyes at them like he can make them multiply with the power of thought alone, then looks up at his mother.  “Christmas is coming up.  I usually get a penny in my stocking.  Can I get it early?”

“You want to use your Christmas present to buy something for Steven?” His mother looks mildly surprised.  James shrugs.

“He’s my best friend.”

His mother looks at him, paused in scrubbing.  After a moment, she smiles, leans over, and kisses his forehead.  “You’re a good friend, Jamie darling.  Fetch my purse for me.”

James’ face brightens.  “Yes’m!”

His mother sets the potato in her hand down and dries her hands on her apron, then digs out her wallet and finds a penny.  “You might also ask Mr McCormick at the green-grocer if you can do some jobs for him to make a couple pennies.”

“Thanks, Ma!” he exclaims, thrusting his coins into his pocket and near flying out of the room.

As always, Darcy follows, unable to do anything else.  She watches the boy, sees his bright smile and his good heart, feeling sick knowing what waits for him in the future.  He cheerfully moves boxes for the green-grocer, helps women to carry their purchases home, and sweeps the front of the store.  

After several days of devoting his after-school freetime to the jobs, James has thirty-four cents.  It is enough to buy the newest Amazing Stories, and a chocolate bar.  Thus armed, he excitedly makes his way to the Rogers’ apartment precisely one week after learning of his friend’s illness.

Mrs. Rogers looks a little less tired when she opens the door this time.  She smiles when she sees who it is, and steps aside to let him inside.  “Hello, Bucky.  Steve’s resting in bed, but he’ll be glad to see you.”

“He’s better?” James says, beaming.  The magazine and chocolate are clutched to his chest.

“Still a bit of a cough,” Mrs. Rogers says.  “But he’s on the mend.”

She leads him to the bedroom, where Steve is a lump of blankets and dirty handkerchiefs.  He looks up as they enter, and lights up.  “Bucky!”

James doesn’t hesitate to climb up on the bed with the smaller boy, beaming a smile at his friend.  “I brought you the new Amazing Stories!  And chocolate!”

“Really?” Steve says, eyes rounding, seeing the items in James’ hands.

“That is very thoughtful of you, Bucky,” Mrs. Rogers says as she collects as many handkerchiefs as she can.  “Thank you.”

“Steve’s my best friend,” James says.  “N’ it’s boring, being in bed all the time.”

“It is,” Steve agrees with all the conviction of a young boy forced to rest when he’s _sure_ he’s perfectly fine.  “Thanks, Bucky.  Here, we’ll share the chocolate.”

Mrs. Rogers smiles as she leaves.  Darcy watches the boys lean their heads together over the magazine as James reads from it and Steve listens intently.  She feels a swell of warmth, similar to the warmth she sometimes feels when a soul passes through the doorway within her.  She reaches out her hands, cupping them in the air over the two boys’ heads, like a shelter, like a blessing.

* * *

Darcy can’t help the sob that escapes when she finds herself beside the adult James Barnes once more.  The sound mixes with the harsh sound of James coming back from unconsciousness to pain.

“Are you back with us, Sergeant Barnes?” The man from the ravine—Schürer—leans over him.  “There you are.  Congratulations, Sergeant Barnes, you have survived stage two.”

Schürer touches James, pressing at the scabbed cuts on his skin with a cold and impersonal air.  The cuts, which had been straight down to the bone in some places, are much healed, but still angry looking.  “I’m afraid the enhancements have not reached the level we would have wished, but they are more than sufficient for our purposes.  We will proceed to stage three.”

James grunts, turning his head away from the man.  He looks even more pale and wan than before, and Darcy aches along with him.

“However, this means it is time for us to say goodbye to you, Sergeant Barnes.  It’s admirable, really, that you survived this long when so many others have not.  You’ve shown true strength, but don’t worry.  I’m sure we’ll put it to good use.” Darcy doesn’t understand what he means.  Will they kill him now?  Schürer gestures to the other scientists and doctors.  “Proceed.”

James struggles when they converge on him, tries to dislodge their hands from his head by bucking against the straps that hold him in place, twisting and throwing his body from side to side.  But he’s still strapped down, and weakened, and there are many of them.  They pin him, shave the matted, messy hair from his head, nicking him several times as they do.  Then there are electrodes, messily glued to the bare skin, and a strap overtop, across his forehead, to keep his head immobile.

They force the rubber mouth-guard back into place between his resisting teeth.

Darcy has seen people electrocuted before.  Sometimes they make noise, air forced from lungs as muscles seize violently, but they don’t scream.  The current holds them; they don’t have the control over throat and lungs to scream.

But they were just normal humans.  James is something more.  James screams, an animal roar of pain.

Darcy knots her hands in her hair, squeezes her eyes shut.

The power cuts, and James pants, harsh and fast.  The mouth-guard is yanked out.

“What is your name?” Schürer asks.  James doesn’t respond.  Schürer backhands him.  “What is your name?”

“J-J-J-James B-Buchanan Barnes,” he shudders and stutters and pants.  “Sergea—”

“You are the Asset.” Schürer forces the mouth-guard back in.  “Increase output by ten percent.”  

The current snaps James’ body back against the gurney.  The scream rises again, gurgling in his throat.

“Stop it,” Darcy begs.  “Stop.”

The power cuts and the question comes again.  James forces out his name as his muscles jump and twitch.  The power comes back on, increased once more.

“What is your name?”

James responds, slurring the syllables together.  

“You are the Asset.”  The power comes back on.

“Stop it!” Darcy screams.  “Stop it!  Stop it!”

They ask his name.  His eyes roll back.  They slap his cheek to catch his attention, ask again.  “Mm… ‘M Bucky.”

It repeats, again.

He becomes progressively more disoriented, hesitant.  His answers start to pitch toward inquisitive.

“What is your name?”

“N-name?”

“Yes.  What is your name.”

“I’m… I’m…”

“You are the Asset."

“N-no.  I’m…”

“You are the Asset.”

When they finally leave him alone, he is barely conscious, and no longer capable of verbal responses.  As they withdraw from the room, Darcy leans over him, tears running down her cheeks, and she whispers:  “Your name is James Buchanan Barnes and I will keep it for you when you cannot.”

He gives a little sighing breath as he slips into darkness.

* * *

“Bucky!” Steve greets, face split by a wide grin.  He pushes off the wall he’d been slouched against, and stuffs his hands into his jacket pockets.

“Hey Stevie,” James says, eyeing his friend suspiciously.  “I know that expression.  What’d you do?”

“Nothing,” Steve says, but his smile grows in contradiction to his words.  “Just… Happy birthday, Buck.”

The thin young man hands an envelope to James, who opens it and grins.  Darcy circles around to look at the narrow strips of paper in his hand as he exclaims:  “Dodgers tickets!”

“I hope you weren’t planning on doing anything else today,” Steve says sincerely.  “I thought we’d go for your birthday.  They’re playing Boston.”

“Don’t be stupid, punk,” James says, slinging an arm around Steve’s shoulders and giving him a friendly jostle.  “There’s nowhere I’d rather be on a day like today than Ebbets Field.”

Darcy has to admit that it is a beautiful day; sunny, with occasional fluffy white clouds scudding across the sky.  It isn’t too hot, either, spring only just blooming.  James looks down at the tickets again.  “These are real good seats, Stevie!  How’d you manage that?”

“Stood in line for two hours,” Steve says dryly.  “And I’ve been saving up for them for months.”

“We’re gonna be able to hear Casey curse out the ump!” James says happily.

“Not if you just hang around here talking ‘bout it,” Steve needles, but he looks pleased, smug about the success of his gift.  James laughs.

“Yeah, okay, okay.  Let’s go.”

Darcy follows them through the streets and into a brick building whose signage proudly declared it “Ebbets Field”.  James and Steve grin and laugh, spirits high as they pick their way through the growing crowd.  The building opens up onto a manicured lawn, surrounded by rows upon rows of seats.  There are men on the lawn in bright white uniforms, tossing a ball back and forth to each other, practicing swinging wooden bats.  Darcy recognizes the game as a more formal version of the one James and Steve had been playing when they first met.

Steve leads James down to a pair of seats only eight rows away from the front.  James’ eyes flick around, drinking in the view.  “Holy cow, there’s Sam Leslie!”

They watch the player toss a ball to a teammate.  James’ excitement seems to be growing exponentially, and Steve can’t stop grinning.  Darcy finds herself infected with their obvious enjoyment of the day, and smiles as she lingers beside James, watching the two young men.

The game begins with a song, everyone in the stadium standing, the men removing their hats.  Darcy recognizes the ritual, the patriotism of humans.  She keeps her eyes fixed on James, watching him sing for the country that he’ll fight for—nearly die for—in his future.  He’s straight-backed and young, the last vestiges of childhood fading from his face.

He cheers and boos the players in turns, whooping in delight whenever his team gets a homerun.  Steve cheers, too, but halfway through the game most of his attention is diverted when he pulls out a pad of paper and starts sketching.  Darcy drifts closer to him to see it better.

The field—the baseball diamond—takes up most of the paper.  He’d captured the batter mid-swing, the other players beginning to move in response.  In the corner of the paper, he’d sketched in the crowd, James in focus at the fore.

Darcy feels warm, watching these people happy and so alive.  It is a strange respite from Shepherding, this lack of blood and pain, but where it once had confused her, she is now fond of it.  Sometimes, though she is careful not to think it too loud—she doesn’t know enough about what she is or where she came from to be entirely free with herself—she wishes she didn’t have to return to the pain.

Even if the older James is the only one who can see her, hear her.

She follows along after them as they leave after the game is over, watching the backs of their heads as they jostle and rib each other with the fond familiarity of best friends or brothers.

“Hey Steve… Thanks, pal.  This was the best birthday.”

“Yeah, Bucky.  ‘Course.”

Unseen by anyone in this place—this memory?—separate and drifting, Darcy feels something she has never felt before.  Loneliness.  She looks at their easy camaraderie, and wishes she could have something similar.  Wishes she were more than she is, a ghost in the world.

* * *

He cries when he wakes up and he remembers his name, and remembers that they’d tried—and succeeded, for a time—to take it from him.  Darcy tries to touch him, to wipe the tears that trail from the corners of his eyes into the stubble at his temples.  She still can’t, of course.  He’s beyond her now, firmly alive.  She can’t touch him any more than she can touch the men who hurt him, however much she’s tried.  She can’t touch them, and they can’t hear her screaming for them to stop.

He can.  Somehow, he can still see her, still hear her.  He watches her try to stand between him and the doctors and scientists, every time.  She can’t stop herself, finds it impossible not to try.  

They steal his name from him again, and then they steal Steve’s name too, and then everything else.  Darcy collects what they take, gathers it up to hold onto until she can give it back.  They’re trying to unmake him—they _are_ un-making him, like she is afraid will happen to her if she ever forgets that she is Darcy, that she is a Shepherd.  She won’t let them succeed.  Not fully.  She won’t let James Buchanan Barnes—she won’t let _Bucky_ —simply fade.

He remembers, at least a little, when he wakes up.  The more fragmented the memories are, the more he struggles when they take them from him again.  But every time they steal his mind from him, the pieces he gets back the next time he wakes are smaller.  They shatter him into smaller and smaller bits until it all just runs through his fingers like sand, and all he has is what they allow him.

It’s only after they’ve ripped Bucky Barnes from his head that they release the restraints keeping him immobile.  Because what do they have to fear from a puppet whose strings they hold?

A lot, apparently, because as the days pass, more of Bucky filters back into the Asset.  The serum, they hypothesize.  It’s allowing his brain to heal, re-establish the memories they thought they’d burned from him.  He is brought back to the table, strapped down again, but not before he lashes out and throws Opel clear across the room.

He screams in wordless defiance as they press him down, force the rubber bit between his teeth like he’s a horse they must break.  And they steal everything again.

The Asset, they write in their records, has limited functionality for fieldwork.  More efficient conditioning is required if deployment is to last longer than a week.

Darcy listens to them speak of him like a thing, watches them dispassionately torture him like it isn’t a human, a life, a soul that they’ve pinned down and disassembled like machinery.  Fire consumes her.  And though she has never felt it before, she realizes that it is hate.


	3. Chapter 3

In the spaces in which Bucky sleeps, naturally or otherwise, she continues to see moments of his life before.  She is party to the enduring friendship and brotherhood of Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes, witnessing Bucky finishing the fights that righteous, pure-hearted Steve starts, watching Steve doodle little cartoons to make Bucky laugh, watching Bucky try to find two women for the pair to take dancing.  She witnesses Bucky’s worry every time Steve falls ill, the fear that it will be the one that does him in.  She is there when Steve’s mother dies and Bucky tries to tell his friend that he’s not alone.

“I’m with you to the end of the line.”

She whispers the words back to him, meaning every syllable of it, every letter.  She is with him.

She is with him when he is fifteen, and has his first kiss, with the girl who teaches him how to dance.  She is with him when he’s eighteen and buys a bottle of whiskey, sharing it in secret with Steve, the pair of them drinking themselves ill.  She is there when he’s twenty-three and falls in love with a woman with a sweet red smile, watches their courtship, listens to him tell Steve he thinks she might be the one.  She’s there when Pearl Harbor happens, and the woman tells him she can’t send him off to die in the war, and instead leaves him alive and brokenhearted.

She witnesses the arguments that flare between Steve and Bucky over enlisting.  Steve wants to fight, wants to do his part.  Bucky is terrified his friend is going to get himself killed.  Steve already can barely survive a back-alley brawl, let alone something where _guns_ play a part.

It gets worse when Bucky gets his draft papers.

His mother cries, clutching him.  His father’s chin firms and his grip on Bucky’s shoulder is just a little too tight.  His sisters cry, too, clinging to his fingers when he reaches his free hand out to them.  Steve’s jaw juts out, and he goes to two more enlistment offices.

Darcy follows him to basic training, then back home to Brooklyn, where he tries to pretend that he isn’t about to leave everything behind, possibly for good.

She cries when he hugs Steve goodbye.  

“You’re a punk.”

“Jerk.  Be careful.”

She knows how this ends.

* * *

They cut divots of flesh out of his arm, legs, chest.  They let the blood flow—why clean or bandage them when the serum will keep them from festering, will heal them in a few days’ time?  They care nothing for the pain.

Darcy doesn’t understand, at first, what they are doing with the tissue they cut from him.  It just seems like they’re put through continuous freeze-thaw cycles, prodding the tissue with needles, slicing away cells to look at under microscopes.

She understands when they bring him to it, the machine large enough to hold him, the machine like a coffin, the machine with tubes and valves and wires.  He’s docile, mind empty, when they lay him in it and close the hinged door.  He only begins to struggle when the hoses attached begin to hiss, vapor wisping off them.  Frost blooms delicately on the inside of the double-paned glass window, and within it, Bucky’s face goes pale and still.  Frozen.

* * *

It’s wet and cool, dark.  Darcy hears a male voice murmuring lowly, a strange absent quality to it.  She blinks once at the room—it is familiar for all that she has never been in it before—before realizing she also recognizes the voice.  It’s Bucky.  And then the reason why the room seems familiar dawns—it is like Schürer’s laboratories, oddly empty but for a cold operating table and trays of instruments.

The door to this room opens, and a tall, broad man enters cautiously.  He’s carrying a shield, striped and starred like the American flag.  He’s also wearing Steve Roger’s face, though he otherwise looks nothing like the frail, sickly man she knows from Bucky’s past.

His eyes widen.  “Bucky!”

He starts ripping the restraints off of his friend, and Bucky stares blearily up at him.  “Steve?”

“God, Buck, I thought you were dead!”  The relief in his voice is palpable, but mixed with a sort of anxiety that makes sense when Darcy notices how often he glances over his shoulder.  They’re not safe, yet.  There’s something that’s making Steve very anxious to get his friend and get out of here.

“I thought you were smaller,” Bucky says, swaying as he gets to his feet.  Steve braces him quickly, then darts for the door.  Bucky staggers after him. “What happened?”

“I joined the army,” Steve says dryly.

“Is it permanent?”

“So far…”

Something blows up, then, cutting off whatever response Bucky might have made.  Everything descends into chaos for a couple hours—explosions, flame, guns that shoot blue energy that sears the edges of Darcy’s awareness, a man with a cadaverous red face.  

“Go on, get out of here!” Steve shouts at Bucky from across a pit of flames.  Darcy’s heart twists in reaction even before Bucky snaps back:

“No!  Not without you!”

“Jump.  Jump, Stevie,” Darcy says, standing beside him.  She’s seen so much of Bucky’s life that she loves him, too.  She could no more turn away from Steve as she could turn away from Bucky.  

As if Steve can hear her, he glances at the gap, then backs up for a running start.

He almost doesn’t make it, slamming chest-first into the edge of the gantry, fingers scrabbling at the honeycombed metal until Bucky lunges forward and grabs fistfuls of his leather jacket to help haul him to safety.  “Jesus Christ, Stevie!”

“C’mon,” Steve pants, staggering upright and grabbing Bucky’s shoulder.  They sprint out of the building just as a series of explosions go off.  It’s just as chaotic outside, with escaped prisoners wreaking havoc on the HYDRA soldiers.  Steve curses and jerks his shield up to cover them both, and bullets ping off of the metal.

“Gun,” Bucky blurts.  “Get me a gun.”

“Shit!” Steve says, holding the shield firm.  “Grab mine; hip holster.  Right side.”

Bucky grabs the pistol as Steve keeps them covered, chambers a bullet coolly.  His face goes blank and still, and he crouches behind Steve and the shield, listening to the bullets that rained down around them.  After a moment, he pops above the level of the shield, calm as you please, and squeezes off three shots.

The hail of bullets stops.

Steve holds his defensive posture a beat, then cautiously lowers the shield.  “Nice shot.  Er… shots.”

His voice sounds a little uncertain.  Bucky doesn’t seem to notice.  He presses the pistol into Steve’s hand and darts forward to grab a large rifle-like gun from beside a dead HYDRA soldier.  He leans against the shelter of a rather bullet-ridden truck to check it over.  “C’mon.  Sounds like there’re still a few left.”

Bucky jerks his chin in the direction of the shouts and gunfire.  Steve nods, expression firming.  “Right.  Let’s go.”

* * *

They’re somewhere new, the room white-tiled, the lights bright.  The doctors’ coats are blue, now.  Darcy doesn’t know how much time has passed, where they’d taken Bucky while he’d been frozen and insensate, or why.  Bucky shivers on a metal operating table, skin unnaturally pale, dripping wet.  They barely seem to notice, only roughly drying him when the water drips onto the floor and becomes a slipping hazard to them.  They check his pulse and reflexes, but ignore the blue tint to his lips and the convulsive shivering.

When he’s warmed enough to be coherent and attentive, they begin their usual round of questioning, checking how much their conditioning is holding.  He’s as formless as when they’d put him in the ice.  They’re pleased.  Darcy is not.

They prick his skin, cut fresh tissue samples out of his skin, exclaim over his regenerative abilities.  They talk about ‘vitrification’ and ‘intravenous glycols’.  They talk about progressing to stage four.  And then they do more than talk about it.

They cut him open while he’s still conscious, gagging him so his screams don’t disturb them as they work.  They lay bare the bones of his chest, back, and left arm.  They drill into the ribs, the clavicle, the sternum.  They cut another four inches off his left arm, shortening the humerus to a mere nub.  They screw in metal plates, reinforcing his skeleton, laying a foundation.  They fold his muscles back over the shining metal, pumping him full of paralytics so he won’t twitch or flinch and ruin their work.  They pull his skin back together with a few crude stitches, caring little for aesthetics and relying more on his accelerated healing than their suturing to do the job of keeping his body together.

Darcy cowers in the corner of the room, screaming along with him, full-throated and ringing where his are muffled.  She’s so afraid for him.

It’s a mercy when he finally passes out.

* * *

Bucky staggers away from the body, breath wheezing in his lungs.  He puts a few trees between them, then falls against one, bark scratching his back through his jacket.  He holds his hands out from his sides as if they’re covered in blood, but they’re clean.  Broken necks don’t bleed.  Even if you twist the head so far around it’s backwards.

Bucky leans over and retches, but only bile comes up, his stomach already empty.  He heaves again and sobs, sliding down the tree so he’s huddled in a crouch against it.  Darcy hovers her hand over the curve of his hunched shoulders and looks back toward the body.  She can just see the dark shape against the snow through the trees.  She thinks she understands what’s wrong.

Humans aren’t supposed to be strong enough to wrench a head around like that.  But Bucky had, and apparently something approaching accidentally, if his shocked reaction is anything to go by.

“Oh God, oh God, oh God,” he says low, panicked, the words tumbling over each other.  He cuts himself off with a fist pressed hard against his mouth, eyes closing, body rocking a little.

“Bucky,” she whispers, wishing yet again that she could touch him.  “It’s okay.  Shhhh.  You’re okay.”

A soft whistle filters to them, and Bucky flinches.  “Fuck.”

He scrambles upright and hurries to put more distance between him and the body he’d left broken and sprawled on the ground, very clearly not wanting to be found anywhere near it.  Once he gets far enough, he stops, breathes for a moment, then gives a whistle of his own.  While he waits for a response, he kneels to scoop up a handful of snow, and scrubs his face with it, trying to mask the fact that he’s both vomited and wept in the last hour.

“Sarge?” a quiet voice says, followed quickly by a dim shape slipping out from between two trees.

“Morita,” Bucky greets, seeming both relieved and wary.  He keeps his voice down, too.

“Damn, Barnes, we thought you’d bought the farm when that tank blew,” Morita says with a huff of relief.  He glances around them tensely.  “Cap’s been on a rampage since.”

“Not dead.”

“No shit,” Morita replies.  “But how about you go tell him that, before he marches straight to Berlin to avenge you.”

“He would,” Bucky says on a sigh.  “The punk.”

“Yeah, well, maybe we should get on with that?  The stopping him,” Morita looks over his shoulder again.  “C’mon, there’s a shit-ton of Nazis in these woods.  Let’s get the hell outta here.”

“Yeah.  Hey, you got a gun I can use?”

“Jesus, Sarge, again? We’re glueing your next rifle to your hands, maybe you won’t lose it then.”

“Not my fault.  The tank blew and then I was compromised and had to bug out.  Dropped the rifle when it got tangled in the barbed wire.”

“Yeah?  And what exactly were you gonna do if you ran into some of our goose-stepping friends out here?”

Bucky shivers, darting a glance back in the direction of the body.  He put on a joking, cocky voice for his comrade, though.  “Hey, I got a pretty good right-hook, y’know.  All that practice dragging Steve out of back-alley brawls in Brooklyn.”

Morita snorts a quiet laugh.  “Yeah, sure, ace.”

* * *

Bucky wakes with a body aching with pain, no memories, and a new, shiny left arm.  He lashes out in what Darcy thinks is perfectly understandable panic, the metal hand closing tightly around the throat of a lab-coated doctor who is leaning just a little too close.  Everyone else freezes.

There’s a crunch of cartilage and tissue, and Bucky throws the now futilely gasping doctor halfway across the room.  This seems to galvanize the rest, and they spring into motion.  Two go for their fallen comrade, one slaps a hand down on a button.  Bucky gives a shout of pain as the half-chair-half-table thing he’s on magnetizes suddenly, snapping his left side down sharply.

The man whose throat he’d crushed is thrashing in a weak, panicked manner, making horrible gurgling sounds.  He’s not going to die, since there is no Shepherd with him.  The two doctors who’d rushed to him and trying to get him to calm down and stop clutching his throat so they can look at it.

Darcy moves to Bucky’s side.  He’s breathing hard, still in the grasp of his panic, his right hand running over his chest where flesh meets metal in a mess of inflammation and crude sutures.  She stares down at it in horror.  “What did they do?”

One of the doctors swears angrily, and Darcy glances over just in time to see the bright orb of a soul arrow directly toward her.  It sinks into her and she feels something _tear_ , within her, and pain flares.  She screams, collapsing.

It’s never hurt, before, to let souls pass through the doorway she holds inside her.  Never.  But then, she’s never been bound to someone who hasn’t died.  She’s never gone anywhere there isn’t a soul to Shepherd.  Many things that have never happened before are happening to her now.

“Is she okay?”  Bucky’s harsh, hoarse voice is asking.  “She’s screaming.  Is she okay?”

The doctors don’t know what he’s talking about, and they’re angry he’s killed one of them.  One backhands him, and he rocks against the chair, still held in place by the magnets.  But he doesn’t look away from her shivering body on the floor, and he doesn’t shut up.  “She’s screaming!  She’s screaming!”

He starts pulling against the magnets, wrenching and jerking, but they hold tight even when stitches start popping and blood starts running down his chest.  His flesh right hand reaches for her, then drops when one of the doctors hits it with a metal baton.  Another doctor stabs a needle into Bucky’s thigh, depressing the plunger quickly.

“S-stop,” Darcy says weakly.  “D-don’t hurt him… stop…”

Bucky’s struggling grows slowly weaker before fading entirely.

“Prep for another conditioning session for when he wakes,” Darcy hears someone say before she’s abruptly somewhere else.

* * *

Brass, jazzy and mellow, melds with the sound of shoes tapping and clothes rustling.  Darcy hugs her arms around herself, still shaken up even though the pain has gone, and takes a moment to collect herself.  Once she’s capable of unfolding from her protective curl, she slowly lifts her head and looks around.

A dance hall.  She blinks and tries to find Bucky.

He looks young, maybe in his teens.  Smooth beaming face, bright eyes, shoulders broad and straight.  He spins a laughing blonde on his arm, grinning at her as he pulls her back in tight.  Somehow, this time it’s a comfort rather than a taunt, to see him unburdened and happy.

Darcy curls into a chair set against the wall, and watches Bucky enjoy a night out dancing.


	4. Chapter 4

She thinks that maybe the reason it had hurt when the doctor with the crushed throat had died and his soul had gone to her was because she had failed to realize that _she_ had been the Shepherd there for his death.  That even though nothing else had been working correctly, that she had been bound to Bucky, she was still expected to Shepherd the souls around her.  Maybe if she had been more aware, if she’d been doing her job, it wouldn’t have hurt.

She doesn’t have the chance to find out whether she’s right until later.  They’re still figuring out what they have to do to keep him under their control.  They torture him, ask him questions.  If he can answer them, they put him through the conditioning again.  They test their work, look for weaknesses in their techniques.

They tell him that Captain America is dead.  Steve Rogers.  Stevie.  Darcy gasps with the pain of the loss.  Bucky’s brow furrows in confusion.

“Steve?” he says, small and slow.  It’s clear he knows the name, but doesn’t know why, or who ‘Steve’ is.  Schürer watches his reaction with narrowed eyes.

“Wipe him again,” he says with a dismissive gesture.

* * *

When finally they think he’s ready, that their control is strong enough, they let him off the table.  And they test their control over him in a different way.

He kills for them, in a caged room into which they release some luckless prisoner.  Bucky stands motionless, expressionless, on one side of the room.  He watches the other man twist about in panic, shake the bars of the door through which he’d been shoved.

“Soldier,” says Schürer, standing beside the cage with a movie camera.  It makes a continuous, if slight, whine as it films them.  “Target disposal.  Kill the man in front of you.”

Bucky steps forward implacably.  The man shakes harder at the bars, too terrified to try to fight back.  Bucky grabs him, and he yelps out a plea.  The crack of his neck snapping is grotesquely loud.  His soul streaks toward Darcy, who is too startled at the _suddenness_ to brace herself and ends up screaming on the floor again.  Her last coherent thought before her mind fuzzes out from the pain is that she hopes Bucky doesn’t react like last time.

It’s too much to hope for.  As the pain fades back down, she’s aware of shouting and a rhythmic sound of metal on metal.  Shuddering, she looks up and sees Bucky pounding on the cage right beside her with his metal arm.  The bars are distorted, but holding.  His face is blank, but his eyes are on her, even as the doctors shout and rush about.

“Stop,” she croaks at him.  “They’ll punish you.  I’m okay.  Stop.”

He punches the cage once more, and then there’s a crack of a gunshot and Darcy screams again as the force of the hit forces Bucky back two steps.  Dread fills her throat with another scream, but it dies away, stillborn, when she realizes there’s no blood.  Bucky yanks the tranquilizer dart syringe from his flesh arm, wavers, then drops slowly to his knees and then sprawls full-length onto the floor.

* * *

It is not the last time they have Bucky kill for them.  Rather, that seems to be their whole purpose in saving him.  They call him the Winter Soldier.  When he is not killing for them, they freeze him, put him away like a tool into a toolbox.  They have a whole system, all the better to control him.  He comes out of the cryo, they wipe his mind of any memories that might have returned, they give him his mission, he completes it, they put him away again.  They use words to trigger him, ‘prime’ him for his mission.  Ten lines to shackle his mind.

“Zhelaniye.  Rzhavyy.  Semnadstat’.  Rassvet.  Pech’.  Devyat’.  Dobroserdechnyy.  Vosvrashcheniye na rodinu.  Odin.  Gruzovoy vagon.”

“Ya gotov otvechat’.”

He doesn’t react to anything if they don’t want him to.  He no longer struggles when they bring him to the chair, or when they put him in the cryo tube.  He doesn’t react to pain, with the sole exception being when he’s in the chair—he can’t seem to help but to scream then.

In turn, Darcy had learned not to react when the souls of the people he kills tear through her.  It still hurts, like fire racing through her, but she can keep herself from screaming, can brace herself so she stays standing when they hit.  She’d had to learn, after the first couple times had left Bucky agitated, and caused his handlers to punish him.  Darcy will not be responsible for any more of the pain visited upon him, so she learns to be stoic just like him.

He still watches her, though.  Any time his attention is not needed on anything else, his eyes are on her as she drifts at the periphery.  At first, she’s afraid that the doctors and handlers will notice and try to ‘fix’ him, but aside from a note in his file, they don’t do anything about the staring.  She’s glad.  She thinks that she is the one thing that they haven’t taken from him, and she doesn’t want them to try.

* * *

“Sergeant Barnes?”

The memory of the weak, confused question echoes in Darcy’s mind.

“Sergeant Barnes?”

He’d killed the man, and the woman, staging it to look like a car wreck.  Any evidence that it hadn’t been would be destroyed by the fire that had started in the engine of the crashed car.  He hadn’t reacted to the name the man had said.  His name.  James Buchanan Barnes, Sergeant.

“Did you recognize him?” she asks him.  She rarely says anything to him that might provoke a response and earn him a reprimand from his handlers for speaking out of turn.  But there are no handlers here, on a motorcycle on this empty road.

“No.”  His voice is flat, lacking inflection.  Robotic.  Inhuman.

 _He knew you_ , she doesn’t say.   _He recognized you._

HYDRA still owns him.  Even if she tells him, he will not be free of them.  She has to carry his memories for a while longer.

* * *

There is a new director for the Winter Soldier Program.  He’s young, handsome, charismatic.  A politician and a spy.

Over the long years, they have changed hands a number of times.  New handlers, new doctors.  The same organization— _hail HYDRA_.  The uniforms change, the language.  But the way they treat him, use him, stays the same.  The machines they use become better, sleeker, as time marches on, but the pain they produce is a constant.  She sees the changes in leaps, skipping from year to year with Bucky as they de-ice him, use him, and freeze him again.

The new director is different.  He’s more aware.  More… calculating.  He reads the notes of the previous handlers and directors, eyes narrowing as he gets to the part about the Asset’s eyes tracking something that isn’t there, that he stares at air like a cat, as if he can see something that they can’t.  The new director lifts his head to survey the Winter Soldier, who is seated straight-backed before him, silent and compliant.

He follows the Soldier’s gaze toward Darcy, but he doesn’t see her, only a stretch of blank wall.  Darcy glares straight into his eyes.  His eyes scan, but don’t catch.  He turns back to the Soldier.

“Soldier, what are you looking at?” he asks, voice a demand.  Fear and shock turn Darcy to ice.  The Soldier’s eyes switch to his face, but he says nothing.  “Answer the question.”

The Soldier doesn’t.  The director’s expression darkens, and he backhands him.

“Just tell him!” Darcy blurts, unwilling for him to be hurt, even if he acts like he hadn’t even felt the blow, turning his face back to the director blankly.  His eyes flick to hers, then back to the director.

“I don’t know,” he says.  The director settles back, appeased slightly.

“What does it look like?”

The Soldier pauses, head tilting.  “A… woman.  In a dress of feathers.”

Darcy blinks.  She’s never really known what humans see when they look at her.  She doesn’t know what she looks like; mirrors don’t reflect her.  But she does know that, to her, her clothes rustle and gleam like ravens’ wings.  A dress of feathers.

“How long has she been there?”

“She’s always been there.”

“Who is she?”

“I don’t know.”

The director stares at him, something like anger passing over his face.  After a long moment, he lifts a gun and empties the clip into the wall through Darcy.  She doesn’t flinch.  Bullets can’t touch her.  She has nothing to fear.  The technicians in the room jerk and duck in alarm.  The bodyguards that had come with him tense, hands on their own weapons.  “Director Pierce!”

He ignored them, staring at the Soldier, who stares back, expressionless.  “Is she still there?”

“She’s always there.”

“Why is she here, Soldier?” Pierce asks, frustration leaking into his voice.  The Soldier blinks.

“Because she’s Death.”

* * *

They send him to assassinate a scientist, but someone called SHIELD gets there first.  The Soldier, instead of taking out the small, weedy man with a single bullet through an apartment window, is forced to steal a motorbike and pursue the scientist and his redhaired bodyguard along twisting cliff-side roads for the better part of five hours.  Finally, they hit a straight-away and he can aim properly, lifting his rifle up and keeping the bike steady with his thighs.

The redhaired bodyguard must know that they’re vulnerable, because she pushes the scientist’s old, rusting car faster.  But it doesn’t matter.  The Soldier shoots out a tire and the vehicle fishtails, hits a guardrail, and tumbles down a shallow incline—the Soldier pulls his motorbike to a halt and looks through his rifle’s scope.

Darcy stands on the guardrail, looking down at the wrecked car.  The bodyguard and the scientist are clambering from the crumpled metal frame, the former quickly slipping into place between the scientist and the road.  There’s a pistol in her hand, but by the way her head swivels, she hasn’t spotted them yet.

The Soldier waits a moment, then sees his chance and takes the shot.  Darcy sees the redhaired bodyguard jerk backward, hands flying to the bloody hole that the bullet has torn in her.  Behind her, the scientist flops lifelessly against the remains of the car.  The bright glimmer of his soul appears like a shooting star, arcing towards her.  She opens her arms for it, and it sinks into her chest and vanishes.  She breathes through the agony that laces through her down to her bones, used to this new facet of her ability now.  It’s a burden she’ll accept, if it means she stays with Bucky.

The Soldier kicks the motorbike back into motion, tearing away from the completed mission objective.

* * *

The next time Pierce thaws them, he is much older, but still dangerous.

“Zhelaniye.  Rzhavyy.  Semnadstat’.  Rassvet.  Pech’.  Devyat’.  Dobroserdechnyy.  Vosvrashcheniye na rodinu.  Odin.  Gruzovoy vagon.”  His tone is almost impatient “Status report, Soldier.”

“Ya gotov otvechat’.”

“Your mission is assassination.  Here is your target,” he says, laying a folder onto a nearby table.  The lab technicians release the Soldier from the prep chair, and he walks to the table, hiding the trembling of his muscles that lingers from the electroshocks with the ease of long practice.  He sits and flips open the folder, and Darcy looks over his shoulder.  The Soldier shifts to let her see easier.  When Darcy glances up, she sees Pierce watching.  For all the wrinkles forming at the corners, his eyes are still sharp.  She can almost imagine he can see her.

 _Dangerous,_ something inside her hisses.

She watches him, as the Soldier reads through the folder at her side.  She wishes for a moment that Pierce _could_ see the glare she levels at him, see how much she hates him.  But he can’t, and so he keeps watching, too sharp, too clever, unaware of the warning she wants to give.   _Stay back.  Stay away from us._

“Mission parameters accepted,” the Soldier says, closing the folder.  Pierce nods once.

“Good.  Rumlow, get him kitted out.  You’re on support for the mission; pick two other agents to go with you.”

“Yes, sir,” says one of the armed men that always surround Pierce when he’s in the same room as the Soldier.  His face is handsome in a rough way, but there’s no kindness at all in his eyes, and it makes him ugly.  “C’mon, Fido.  Heel.”

Darcy’s nostrils flare as she takes a sharp breath, anger a torch burning in her heart.  The Winter Soldier just follows silently, his conditioning making him compliant no matter how they treat him.

The Soldier is given a new uniform, updated with the most recent advances in tactical fabrics and with new webbing for all the new weapons he is given.  Those have advanced as well since the last time.  He takes a few moments to field strip and reassemble each gun, to test the balance of the knives.  As he does so, Rumlow gathers up the rest of his team.

They’re all cut from the same cloth as Rumlow—muscled, stern, lacking any softness.  They eyeball the Soldier, then completely ignore him, though the van they pile into the back of means they’re in close quarters.  He sits quietly and doesn’t look at any of them, staring stoically ahead.  He doesn’t pay very much attention to Darcy, either, but he usually doesn’t, on missions.  He is a wall of menace for the duration of the ride to their drop-off point, still and silent as they listen to the radio chatter as the teams that have first crack at the target fail in their objectives.

“Send in the Asset.”  The order comes down.  The Soldier opens the door and gets out of the van, striding purposefully away before any of the other men can say anything.  He has his orders; he doesn’t need them.

Darcy follows as he walks almost lazily down the street, head turning to watch the traffic coming down the cross-street.  Then he steps out into the middle of the road.  There’s a black SUV driving toward them, riddled with bullet-holes and with most of the windows smashed or cracked.  He lifts his gun, and the attachment releases a magnetic mine like a discus.  It attaches to the undercarriage of the SUV and detonates, flipping the car into the air.  The Soldier steps neatly out of the way, the SUV passing so close it ruffles his hair.

It comes to a halt several yards away with the shriek and scrape of metal crunching and dragging on concrete.  Darcy knows the man inside is still alive; his soul has not fled.  The Soldier walks unhurriedly towards the up-ended vehicle, rips the door off with his left arm, and ducks to look inside.

It’s empty, with a rough hole cut into the roof and the manhole cover below, the edges still orange with the heat of whatever had cut through them.  The Soldier straightens, then grips the car and hauls it to the side with a loud screech.  The remnants of the manhole are welded to the body of the car from the cuts, and are pulled away with it, revealing the dark pit of the sewer access.

* * *

They catch up with the target at night.  It isn’t that the Soldier is bad at tracking, but they’d had to report in and clear the change of plans.  Over the decades, limitations and rules had been established for the operation of the Winter Soldier; after a series of incidents in the ‘50s, it had been determined that letting the him go off-mission was a risk.  They usually give him very clear instructions, and he usually just follows them; his success rate being what it is, having to pursue a target after a failed attempt had never before been a problem.

The extended mission parameters are accepted, and the Soldier finds the target holed up in an apartment in Dupont Circle.  He sets up his rifle on a rooftop across the street, and waits for a clear shot.  It’s a while in coming, but eventually he squeezes off three high-powered rounds.  They crash through the window, through the target’s center of mass, and into the wall behind him.  He falls.  The man he’d been talking to jolts into action, dragging him out of sight.  The Soldier watches through the scope to confirm the kill, but the comm unit that’s been pressed into his ear crackles.  “Backup’s been called.  Target is unresponsive; your part here is done, Soldier.  Get back to the rendezvous before you’re spotted.”

He leaves the rifle—they’ll get no evidence or leads from it anyway—and runs.

The man with whom the target had been speaking follows.  He’s fast, and strong, and catches them on the rooftop of a brick apartment.  The Soldier is just at the edge and about to jump down to meet Rumlow and the team in the van when he hurls a metal disc at them.  The Soldier’s arm catches it easily, stopping it cold right before it strikes him.  At his side, Darcy gapes.

It’s not a disc.  It’s a shield, white star at its center.  Darcy’s head snaps around to look at the man who stands, shocked, at the other end of the roof.

“Steve?” she whispers.

The Soldier throws the shield back at him, and jumps off the edge of the roof.  Darcy lingers as long as she can, staring at Steve as he catches the shield for the space of a breath before she has to follow the Soldier.

It _is_ him.  She would recognize him anywhere.  But they’d said he’d died.

She watches the Soldier as he rendezvous with Rumlow and the others, but he doesn’t seem to have recognized anything about his opponent.  Darcy’s heart aches.  If he _knew_ …

If _Steve_ knew…

She feels twitchy, like there’s electricity running under her skin; she can’t sit still.  She wants to say something, wants to ask the Soldier, see if there’s anything of Bucky in him still.  But he still belongs to HYDRA.  She can’t.  Not yet.  But maybe, if Steve is here…

She doesn’t realize she’s humming to herself until she notices that the Soldier is watching her, eyes a little wide.  The song is the one she’d used to sing to the dying.  It’s a soothing song, warm and gentle, meant to ease them into death.  She’s sung it to him, before, only twice.  Once when he’d been shot twice in the stomach and had had to lay low, alone and bleeding, until backup had come to collect him.  She’d sung softly to him as he’d dug the bullets out of his healing flesh with one of his combat knives.  The other time when they hadn’t given him a mission immediately after thawing and conditioning, instead giving him a tiny cell-like room, an inconclusive experiment to see if he operated better if given a couple hours to re-orient himself after coming up from cryo-freeze.  She’d sat at the head of the cot, singing and gently stroking the air over his hair, since she couldn’t actually touch him.

For whatever reason—possibly the same reason she is inextricably bound to him—the mind wipes have never touched his memories of her.  He knows he has seen her before, knows she is always with him, that nobody else can see her, and he remembers her song.  But she’s never used it to do anything but to comfort him, and never when anyone else is nearby.  It’s an obvious change of behavior, the type that the Winter Soldier has been trained to notice and analyze.

But since he doesn’t remember Steve, or at least hadn’t recognized him on that rooftop, he doesn’t know why her behavior has changed.  He watches her like a hawk as they return to base, as he disarms and removes his tactical vest, and all through the mission debrief.

And as he watches, so does Pierce.  The director doesn’t miss a single flicker of his eyes, following the Soldier’s gaze as it tracks Darcy’s nervous pacing around the room.

“Soldier, is the woman in the feather dress here right now?” Pierce finally asks near the end of the report.

“Yes,” the Soldier replies, eyes never moving from her.  She stops pacing and watches, suddenly frightened.

“Are you looking at her right now?”

“Yes.”

“Excellent,” says Pierce, drawing a gun out of his shoulder holster as he turns, leveling it at her with a cold, calm expression.  She has the smallest fraction of a second to realize that it’s one of the blue energy weapons she’d seen in Bucky’s memories before the shot hits her.

It feels like fingers of ice and fire digging into her and wrenching her apart, tearing her, shredding her like all it wants to do is to make her nothing.  She’s screaming, though she isn’t sure how she is without a throat or lungs or mouth.  She cold, but hot, and she’s burning, burning, burning.

Something small and cold presses against her temple.  She doesn’t react, only screams, but the sound is less now.  Rasping, breathy, barely-there.

“Stand down Soldier!” someone barks, audible even through the buzz of agony in her ears.  “Stand down, or she gets a very real bullet through the head.”

She doesn’t hear what happens next, but somebody grabs a handful of her hair and lifts her head with it.  She gives a cracked moan at the pain of it pulling at her scalp, and then Pierce is staring at her, face-to-face, and he can _see her_.

Alarm is a muted pulse in her as her vision washes white and black, and for the first time in her memory, she closes her eyes and knows no more.

* * *

When she opens her eyes, she’s strapped to a chair and she feels a spike of fear before she realizes it’s not the wipe Chair.  She blinks and slowly lifts her head.  Pierce is sitting in a chair across a table from her.  Two armed men flank the door behind him.

Pierce doesn’t speak, just watches her take in the room.  Darcy licks her lips—they’re dry—and presses her fingers against the metal frame of the chair.  It’s cold against her skin.  It’s strange to _feel_ the world, instead of only seeing it.

“My Asset tells me that you are Death,” Pierce finally says.  Darcy’s jaw tightens with anger at the possessive.

“I am a part of it,” she allows stiffly.  He raises his eyebrows.

“Care to elaborate?”

“I…” She struggles with what to say.  Should she even tell him anything?  But if she doesn’t, he’ll hurt her, or worse, Bucky.  “I… Shepherd souls.  Others have called me valkyrie, or psychopomp.  I don’t kill, but I deal with the dead.”

“Valkyrie?  Are you from Asgard?”

“I don’t know,” Darcy says.  “I just… am.”

Pierce’s expression doesn’t change, but still manages to convey just how unimpressed he is.  “You don’t know.”

She looks down at the table.  “I don’t remember being born, or being made.  All I remember are the souls.”

Pierce hums thoughtfully.  “What powers do you have, as a… valkyrie?”

“I think of myself as a Shepherd,” she tells him.  “And I… don’t really have powers.  I’m… I’m more like a… a doorway given form and sentience.  When a human dies, their soul passes through me to… to wherever it’s meant to go.”

She doesn’t think she’s imagining the look of disappointment on his face.  No powers.  He can’t exploit her.

Then his expression changes and she’s suddenly afraid again.

“Tell me… why do you spend so much time around the Winter Soldier?”

 _So that I can give him back himself when he escapes you.  So that I can help him.  So that he is not alone with you._ “Because I am waiting for him to die,” she says.  It’s not entirely a lie; she’d thought that the reason, at the very beginning, but it had changed along with everything else.

Pierce hums again, and flips open a folder on the table and reads out of it: “The Asset became agitated, asking if ‘she’ was okay and repeatedly stating ‘she is screaming’.  Sedative formula eleven-dash-C was effective in calming him.”

He looks up at her.  “I assume the ‘she’ refers to you.”

She watches him, heart beating fast in her throat.  He glances back down at the folder.  “Asset observed tracking movement of unknown object, unseen to project team.  Behavior deemed no threat to functionality; behavior is not observed in the field.

“I have seen him watching you.  And when I shot you with the Tesseract pistol, he moved to defend you.”  He pauses as if waiting for her to say something, but when she doesn’t, he leans back and says: “His reactions to you suggest that _he_ , at least, feels more of a connection than that.”

Darcy blinks at him.  “I have no control over his reactions or feelings.”

Pierce looks pleased.  “No, you don’t.  I, however, do.  And I think that having you in hand gives me another tool to do so.”

He stands up to leave, as Darcy tries to breath against the sudden tightness in her chest.  “Enjoy your stay with us, Shepherd.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...Surprise?


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There won't be an update Friday; I'll be off geeking out at a convention. :) Monday will see a new chapter, though. Which is good, because it give me a little more time to write... I'm running out of pre-written chapters!

Her dress rustles softly as she follows Pierce through the varied doors and gates to enter the bank lockbox vault.  Some of the tension she’s been carrying with her releases at her first glimpse of the Soldier.  In all this time since finding him at the bottom of that ravine, she’s never been separated from him in one form or another.

He has clearly been uneased by her absence as well, because his eyes snap to her immediately and his shoulders loosen minutely.  She takes two steps toward him and is stopped by the arm Pierce holds out to bar her way.  “Do you really expect me to let you near my Asset now?”

“I have been near him for the last seven decades,” she tells him, stiff and upset.

“And in all that time, you have never been able to touch him,” he says calmly.  Darcy goes cold.

 _How did he know?_ She hates his too-sharp eyes.

Turning away from her, he places a folder onto the table and tells the Soldier: “One of our agents has been compromised, and captured by the enemy.  He is a security threat.  Your mission is assassination.  Here are your targets.”

The Soldier stands and moves to the table and starts reading.  Darcy knows she should be watching Pierce, who is the greatest threat to her and to Bucky, but she can’t look away from the Soldier.

He’s going out there, without her.

She knows he’s more than capable—she’s had a front-row view of his abilities—but it still terrifies her.  Because what if he’s killed and she’s not there?  Would another Shepherd be with him?  Would he be alone?  What would happen to his soul?

“Mission parameters accepted,” says the Soldier.  He doesn’t look at her; he’s On Mission, and he doesn’t look at her when he’s On Mission.  All she can do is watch as he’s led out to be outfitted and equipped.

“Sir,” says someone.  "There is a message waiting for you from the World Security Council.”

Pierce makes a displeased sound.  Striding toward the exit, he shoots the command over his shoulder: “Watch her.”

Darcy licks her lips nervously, suddenly very aware of the armed men standing nearby.  She stays very still, awkwardly in the middle of the room, for a while.  She should probably move out of the way, but she doesn’t know how they will react to her movement.  Finally, really slowly, she shifts over towards the table and chair and sits down.  The folder is still there.  Darcy stares at it, wanting to know what the Soldier is heading towards, but still afraid of the guards.  She doesn’t think they’ll let her look at it; the words “SECRET - LIMDIS” blazoned across it in very forbidding red type.

She doesn’t like this.  She should be with him.  She shouldn’t be at the mercy of these humans.  

The feathers of her dress shiver like it’s alive.

She doesn’t know what to do.  She’s never had any sort of power to help him, and now she has no power to help herself.  And they might use her to hurt him even more.

 _We need to get away._  But how?  She lets her eyes drift around the room.  There’s only one way out.  Right now, there are three armed guards in the vault, but more come when either the Soldier or Pierce are here.  There are also two doctors, who do maintenance and conditioning on the Soldier.  She doesn’t know what waits beyond the vault aside from the interrogation room.  Are there more guards in the floors above them?  Presumably, but how many?

Darcy stares at the table, biting at her lip.  Though she now has a corporeal form and could theoretically help the Soldier escape, she is also vulnerable to attack and doesn’t know how to defend herself.  She’s a liability.  More of a hinderance than a help, unless she can persuade the Soldier to leave her and escape himself.  But she doesn’t think that’s possible.  Even with all the damage they’ve done to him, the conditioning, she is still his, and he knows it.

They never have been able to take her from him.

* * *

Darcy jumps, startled, when there’s a clatter of sound from the entrance.  The Soldier appears, already stripped bare of weapons and his tactical vest.  He goes straight for the Chair, and sits as per protocol.  He doesn’t have any injuries that she can see, but… Darcy smothers a gasp when she sees his left arm, the smooth plating damaged, dented like the edge of something had slammed with considerable force into it.  Under the mangled plates, she could see the fine mechanics of the arm’s underworkings.  She swallows, heart pounding, and can’t look away from the ugly dent.  The arm is supposed to be a vibranium alloy, very difficult to damage.  What had happened?

The doctors mutter over the arm, frowning, and pulling out tools they don’t usually have to use when conducting maintenance.  Darcy pulls herself together, and looks at the Soldier’s face, and her heart gives another lurch inside her.

The Winter Soldier generally has a blank sort of look, a odd flatness to his eyes even when they are so sharp and alert.  But this is different.  He looks… _lost_.

It takes her, and everyone else in the vault, by surprise when he suddenly lashes out, sending the doctors flying with a swift, sudden sweep of his arms.  He subsides almost immediately, sitting on the Chair, body tense, arms flexed, though the guards don’t relax.  They keep their guns trained on him, ready to fire at the slightest provocation.

The doctors get up and scurry out of the vault, faces pale, eyes wide.

“Sir!” one says as Pierce appears, trailing more guards.  “Sir, he’s unstable—erratic!”

Pierce ignores him, striding in and surveying the Soldier.  He stops a few yards back, giving the guards a clear shot and staying out of reach.  “Mission report.”

The Soldier doesn’t answer, staring with that lost look at the floor.  Darcy bites her lip nervously, feeling the tension in the room acutely.  Pierce is angry.  The Soldier is noncompliant.

“Mission report, now!” Pierce snaps, then at the continued lack of an answer, moves forward and backhands the Soldier across the face, spanning his head to the side.  He slowly turns his head back to face front, and his eyes flicker up.

“The man on the bridge… Who was he?”

Something passes over Pierce’s face.  He responds: “You met him earlier this week on another assignment.”

_Steve._

Darcy can’t help the sharp breath she takes, but thankfully, it’s masked as Bucky says, in confusion: “I knew him.”

He did.  He does.  It can only be Steve.

“You do,” she blurts, and the Soldier’s eyes meet hers.  Her heart thumps, and she’s terrified, but she keeps going.  “His name is Steve.  Steve Rogers, he’s your best—”

Pierce takes a few quick steps over to her and hits her, hard, across the mouth.  She cries out and falls, and then there’s chaos.  The Soldier is up, going for Pierce like a junkyard dog, snarling.  But Pierce’s guards are fast and converge on him, guns menacing.  Bucky catches the bullets on his metal arm, shots pinging harmlessly off the polished extensors and bicep, but he’s forced into stillness, defensive.  The rest of the guards hustle Pierce out of the room as quickly as they can, leaving five men to deal with the angry Winter Soldier.

They’re scared, surprised by his sudden viciousness, and it makes them stupid.  They empty their clips in panic, and all have to reload at the same time; that’s when he moves.

He kills one by snapping his neck, a sharp, decisive move.  The second fumbles his semi-automatic for half a second before grabbing his pistol and getting off two shots before the Soldier is on him, dodging the shots and coming up under his guard, breaking his arm to take the pistol away and firing it point-blank at his forehead.  The third and fourth guards manage to reload their semi-automatics, and pin the Soldier in place with another spray of bullets while the fifth guard jerks around and lunges for her.

Darcy screams as his hands close on her, and she sees the Soldier’s hand twitch, the one holding the pistol.

“Stand down, or she dies!” shouts the guard into a short pause in the shooting.  Darcy yanks at her arm in his grip, baring her teeth at him.

“No!  Let me go!” she shrieks.  He jabs the muzzle of his semi-automatic into the side of her head.

“Shut up,” he snaps at her, then repeats: “Stand down, Soldier!”

“NO!” Darcy screams, rage filling her.  She reaches out to shove him away, to hit him, to _do something_.

Her hand goes straight through his chest.  He gives a choked, wet gasp.

“Holy shit!” someone screams, as Darcy jerks her hand back and he collapses lifelessly.  His soul clings to her fingertips like blood.  It feels wrong, dizzying and nauseating, pulling at her skin.  She curls her hand into a fist, the soul clenched in her palm.  It fizzles and vanishes, and the sick feeling that results causes her to stagger.

And then a bullet punches into her thigh and she screams in rage and pain, and her dress _explodes_ off her, unfurling into massive wings at her back and leaving her pale and naked and furious.  She screams at the two remaining guards again,  but the Soldier is already moving on them while they are distracted by her.  They don’t mistake her nakedness for anything sensual; there is nothing in their eyes but horror as the fragment of death that she embodies stares them down in towering rage.

The Soldier gives them freedom from their fear with two quick shots.  Their bodies topple.  Darcy stumbles back, going down on one knee and breathing harshly.

Everything is quiet for a moment, then the Soldier grabs her shoulder, and she lets him drag her out of the vault.  He has traded his pistol for one of the semi-automatics, and has a second one slung across his back, which he’s covered in a pilfered Kevlar vest.

The knowledge that there are more guards in the building somewhere is distant and vague in her mind.  The Soldier disposes of them handily, their souls flying back to Darcy where she slumps against a wall, where he’d left her out of the firefight.  Her dress has mostly refolded itself around her again, no longer wings, and she’s trembling with shock, blood dripping down her leg.

When the Soldier comes back for her, he brings a gallon jug of bleach from a janitor’s closet with him, and pours it over the little puddle of blood she’s left beside the wall.  Leaving the jug behind, he lifts her into his arms and carries her out of the bank.

* * *

Darcy wakes to find her head in the Soldier’s lap and his fingers gently tracing her features.  Her leg throbs, but she can feel the snug pull of a bandage around it, so the wound has obviously been treated.  She lies still for a while, eyes closed, enjoying the sweet feel of his touch feathering over her.  It’s the first time anyone has touched her with such care.

“Bucky,” she sighs.  His hand stills.

“Am I Bucky?” His voice is low, hesitant.  Her eyes open and she looks up at him.  Confusion and… and a little bit of fear show on his face.

“Yes.  Your name is James Buchanan Barnes, but everyone called you Bucky,” she tells him softly.  His eyes flick from side to side and he licks his lips.

“I don’t… I don’t remember.”

Darcy lifts her hand and touches his cheek.  “That’s okay.  I’ll help you.”

* * *

In addition to being able to tear the soul from a man and her dress revealing itself to be able to turn into wings, Darcy also finds out that she heals as quickly as if she’d received the same serum as Bucky.  The gunshot wound in her thigh is closed over, if still flushed with inflammation and tender, within a couple days.  As she convalesced in the abandoned, condemned building Bucky had brought them to after escaping the bank vault, he slipped out into the world to get them food and less conspicuous clothing.

She stares at the folded pile—pants, shirt, even the undergarments that human women wear (Soldier efficiency or Bucky humanity?)—and wonders if she can even remove her dress.  It had unfolded into wings; is it attached to her somehow?  If she removes it, does it change anything about her?  Will she still have wings, will she still be a… whatever she is?

“Is… Did I get it wrong?” Bucky asks, watching her stare at the clothes.  Without the unquestioning obedience conditioned into him by HYDRA, he has fallen into hesitance and uncertainty.  His brow is furrowed.  Darcy shakes her head quickly.

“No, no, it’s just… I don’t… know if my dress is actually a dress.”

His expression clears, and he tilts his head.  “The wings.”

“Yeah, the wings,” she sighs.  He shifts, pulling at the sleeve of his new jacket where it rides up on his left wrist.

“Can’t you… make them something else?  Not a dress?”

She opens her mouth to tell him no, but stops because she doesn’t actually know if she can or cannot control it.  She’s never tried.  She doesn’t know _how._ The wings had appeared when she was threatened, hurt, enraged; it hadn’t been a conscious thing.  She closes her eyes and tries to think back to it, tries to remember what had happened, what it had felt like when her wings had appeared.

It feels like stretching, but no muscle that Darcy can tell is actually _there_ .  Her wings unfold, raven-black but with more joints than any bird she’s ever seen.  Her soft gasp is lost in the _shush_ of feathers and the _woomp_ of moving air.  The wings curve carefully, brushing against the crumbling walls of the room.  Bucky pushes himself into a corner, but his face is not surprised or scared.  He looks at her wings with awe and longing.

“Can you fly?” he asks, when Darcy just stands there, flexing her wings so that the thin sunlight filtering in through the crack in the ceiling shimmers blue-green on the feathers.  She startles, surprised at the question.

“I don’t know,” she says, then smiles wryly.  “Those words certainly get a work-out between the two of us.”

He looks suddenly guilty, and Darcy stills.  “Bucky?  What is it?”

“I found…” he trails off, then pulls some battered paper out of his pocket, offering it to her.  She takes it, and sees that it is a pamphlet about the new Captain America exhibit at the Air and Space Museum.  “I thought it might help me remember.”

“Did you go?” she asks, not really sure why he’s feeling guilty.  He shakes his head.

“Will you go with me?”

“Of course!”  His shoulders relax.  She pauses, glancing at her wings where they curl in around them.  “...Once I figure out how to deal with these.”

“What did you do, to make them come out?” Bucky asks.  He reaches out a hand like he’ll stroke a feather, but pulls it away without touching.  Darcy stretches the pinion, slipping it against his jaw, and his face softens and he gently runs a fingertip down the blade of it.

“I thought about how I felt the first time they did,” she says.  “I think I have the hang of it…”

She closes her eyes and remembers the rustle of the feathers against her, around her.  The wings fold in close, forming the dress again.  She looks down at herself with pleasure.  “Ha!”

A moment later, she unfolds them again and flexes thoughtfully.  “I’m going to try to…”

The wings shiver, but remain, and Darcy frowns.  She closes her eyes and tries again, trying to remember the pull, the shift, trying to direct it.   _Small.  Hidden.  Small.  Hidden._

Her feathers slide along her skin, wings drawing in, slipping, shivering, slithering.  She stops, opens her eyes, pants for breath.  The wings are a wide necklace hanging over her shoulders, against her collarbones.  Gasping, she touches them, warm and soft against her fingertips.  "Oh!"

She looks up at Bucky.  He looks at the necklace critically, circles around her .  “They drape down to your shoulder-blades,” he reports.

She shrugs her shoulders experimentally, and the necklace moves with her, smooth and flat against her skin.  Bucky circles back around in front of her.  “I think they’ll mostly be hidden by your shirt.”

She nods her understanding, and there’s a moment of silence before Bucky says: “You should… probably get dressed.”

Darcy blinks, then suddenly remembers that humans are body-shy and don’t typically stand naked in front of others as easily as she has been.  But she and Bucky haven’t been human in a long time—she’s not sure she’d ever been—and aren’t used to the little rules of humanity.  Bucky is slowly remembering, and she is slowly learning… but they’re still more playing at it, going through the motions, than anything.

“Oh, right,” she says, and picks up the clothes.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm so glad everyone's enjoying this story so far; the response has been great. You all are lovely~

Darcy chews on her lip and looks up and down the pre-dawn street.  There’s nobody out in this area—it is an old industrial area, and mostly the site of condemned buildings and in-process-renovations.  But she hasn’t been out in the world like this; she’d been unconscious when Bucky had found the place for them, and then convalescing inside.  Thinking about it now, she’s not sure she likes how vulnerable it makes her feel, that everyone who looks can see her.

“What if they find us?” she asks Bucky, who is patiently waiting behind her.

“They won’t,” he says.  “Pierce is dead.  Ste—Captain America stopped the mission, revealed HYDRA to SHIELD and the world.  Their cover is blown; they’re not going to be making any big moves right now.

“And,” he adds, “I have knives and a gun.”

Darcy thinks that he means for it to reassure her, but it doesn’t really.  She doesn’t want him to have to fight.  She doesn’t want him to need those weapons.  The reminder that he’s carrying them because they might very well be attacked is a bitter one.  But she also knows they’re necessary.  Bucky won’t feel secure without them.  He needs to be able to defend himself, and her.  So she just nods and says: “Okay.”

Bucky slips around her and outside, hands tucked into his pockets to hide the metal of the left one, a baseball hat tugged low over his brow.  “C’mon, sweetheart, let’s go.”

A flood of warmth washes over her at the endearment.  She’d been alone for as long as she could remember before appearing for Bucky in that ravine decades ago, and then she’d been a silent companion unable to truly interact with anyone in this world.  This—having conversations, touching him, him touching her, him calling her ‘sweetheart’—is all so new, and so… If feels so good.  She likes it.

She follows him through the quiet streets until they reach a bus stop; the wait is fifteen minutes long, but eventually a bus comes and carries them closer to the capitol proper and the National Mall.  They get off the bus and take a long stairway down to the metro line.  Bucky seems twitchy in the echoing concrete tunnels, but stays quiet and unobtrusive for the duration of their ride.  Coming up from the underground, they find the sun has risen.  Joggers making their way around the long green stretch of the Mall, but the museums are not yet open.  They find a coffee shop down a side street to wait out the couple of hours.

Darcy has her first taste of hot chocolate, and becomes utterly enraptured.  When Bucky tells her that there is a food chocolate, that you eat instead of drink, her eyes grow large.  “Oh, yes!  I remember.  You bought Steve a bar when you were young.  And they used to give you chocolate rations during the war.”

She regrets blurting this out immediately, seeing Bucky frown, head tilting down.  There’s a long pause in which he hides behind his hair and she keeps her mouth occupied with the hot chocolate, and then Bucky says hesitantly: “I think I… I liked chocolate.  I used to trade my cigarette ration for it.”

“Do chocolate bars taste like this?” Darcy asks.

Bucky looks at the hot chocolate Darcy had ordered for him, sitting untouched on the tiny cafe table.  She realizes the problem quickly.  “Oh.  Sorry, I didn’t think.  Here, what if you taste mine?”

He only hesitates a moment, long enough to assess her, probably checking for any indication that her drink had been tampered with and is affecting her.  Then he takes the cup from her hand and sips at it.  Because she’s watching him closely, she sees his pupils dilate and his lashes flutter at the taste, even though he keeps most of his reaction under control.

It’s his first taste of anything chocolate since he fell.

“Chocolate bars tastes a little different from this, but similar,” he tells her.  She notices that he doesn’t give it back, instead taking another, larger, drink.  Darcy smiles at him and takes his untouched cup, letting him have hers.  She drinks it slowly, savoring the rich warmth.  Bucky is greedy with his, taking large gulps that drain the cup quickly.  When she notices him eyeing her and her half-full cup, she takes one last gulp—too big to be polite, really—and passes the rest to him.  It’s worth if for the way his eyes brighten, even if his expression remains straight.

“Do you think there’s somewhere around here we can buy chocolate bars?” she asks.  Bucky finishes the second hot chocolate and they leave to find out.

There’s a drugstore a couple blocks away, and Bucky is shocked to stillness at the wall of candy they find there.  Darcy stares at the colorful displays, hopelessly lost and overwhelmed.

“There are so many flavors…” she says, finding the chocolate.  “Which one should we get?”

They get one of each, because Bucky can’t choose, and he has a lot of money that he took from HYDRA.  The cashier looks confused and surprised when they dump their armloads of candy bars onto the counter, but gamely rings them up.  As an afterthought, they also buy a backpack, and load it up with the bars.

They go back to the Mall and find a bench that is semi-hidden but still affords Bucky a good view for surveillance.  Sitting down, they put their heads together and catalogue their loot.  Darcy holds up five bars, fanned out in her hands.  “Which one should we try first?”

They try all of them, as it turns out, and Darcy would have thought they’d be sick, but Bucky has a stomach of iron and a serum that increases his metabolism.  And Darcy… well, Darcy isn’t human, whatever else she may be.  The chocolate doesn’t make her sick, though admittedly she doesn’t eat as much as Bucky.  The candy does, however, make them both incredibly thirsty, coating their mouths stickily.  They go back to the drugstore and buy a few bottles of water, two of which they drink down immediately.  Another two go into their backpack.

A glance at the drugstore’s clock tells them that the museums are open now, and they head straight for the Air and Space Museum.  Darcy gets most of the way through the door before she realizes that there’s a security check to get into the museum; she freezes, then turns back to warn Bucky… Except he’d stopped halfway up the stairs, staring pale-faced at the glass and stone edifice of the building.  She goes back to him, touching his arm gently.  His hands are dug deep into his pockets and his shoulders are up nearly to his ears.

“Bucky?  Are you okay?”

“What if… what if I don’t remember him?”

“What?”

“What if this doesn’t help?  What if I can’t remember?”  For a broad-shouldered, well-muscled man, he looks surprisingly vulnerable.  Darcy slips her arm through his.

“Then we keep trying, different ways,” she says quietly.  “They said that the serum they gave you was helping your brain heal; that’s why they wiped you so often.  You just need time.  You just need to be reminded.”

He stares at the museum a little longer, then shakes his head.  “I don’t know.  But… But I should try, shouldn’t I?”

It sounds more like he’s asking himself, so Darcy doesn’t respond besides to squeeze his arm a little.  He takes a deep breath, and says: “Okay, let’s go.”

They get up five steps before Darcy suddenly remembers: “Oh, wait.  Um.  There’s a metal-detector and a bag search to get into the museum…”

Bucky shrugs.  “It won’t be a problem.”

“Okay,” Darcy says, trusting him.  She hadn't been sure his weapons where his weapons are, in the bag or on his person. She knows that the metal detector won't go off when he walks through—HYDRA would have little use for an assassin who couldn't make it through even the simplest security checks, so the device they'd built into his arm would prevent the detection of the masses of metal in his arm and shoring up his skeleton.  As long as his knives and gun are on him, then security won't find them unless they frisk him, which doesn't seem to be part of the check.  Neither of them are certain how the device works; they only know that it does.  Darcy is relieved (Bucky needs weapons to feel safe, and if HYDRA finds them, she will also be glad he has them), but at the same time, it is a reminder of what they had made him and it makes her both sad and angry.

Bucky touches her cheek lightly with his flesh hand, then leads her past the Apollo 11 command module and down the hall to the special exhibit “Captain America: Return of an American Hero.”  Darcy thinks that Steve would be horribly embarrassed by the title.  He’d never thought of himself as a hero, just another soldier doing his job.

There’s a large painted portrait of Steve—Captain America cowl in place—to greet visitors as they enter the exhibit.  Rounding that, they pass down a short corridor that describes who Steven Grant Rogers was, where he had come from.  Bucky watches a little boy stand up as straight as he can against a height chart upon which both pre- and post-serum Steve’s silhouettes have been painted.  The boy reaches mid-chest on pre-serum Steve, but just barely above the waist on Captain America.  His father, laughing, picks him up to put his head level to the taller Steve’s.

The next block of text describes the procedure that had made Steve into Captain America, and has old black-and-white photographs of Doctor Abraham Erskine and Howard Stark, as well as the machine that they had made together.  Bucky looks at the photograph briefly, jaw tightening, and Darcy wonders if maybe the image of the coffin-like pod reminds him too much of the cryostasis chamber HYDRA had kept him in, in the beginning.

They read about how a HYDRA agent had killed Erskine and stolen the last vial of serum, before being chased down and captured by the newly-made super soldier Steve Rogers.  They read about how, lacking the ability to make more soldiers like him, the army hadn’t sent him into active combat, and how he’d volunteered to work with a Senator selling war bonds, before he’d gone to Europe with the USO and—while there—disobeyed orders and mounted a one-man rescue operation to free over a hundred Allied soldiers being held by HYDRA at Azzano.  All six of the men who would become the Howling Commandos were prisoners there.

The exhibit opens up into a large room then, seven mannequins dressed in the personalized uniforms of the Howling Commandos and Captain America displayed prominently so that they are the first thing visitors see after reading about Azzano and the first true act of Captain Steve Rogers as a soldier.  Behind them is a mural of portraits, each paired with the mannequin showcasing his uniform.  Bucky stares up at his face for a long time, eyes blank, and then walks mechanically to the nearest display.

They take their time in the exhibit, reading every word, looking at every item displayed, watching every documentary video.  As they go, Darcy realizes a trend in the order they visit the displays: Bucky is slowly circling around the one devoted to him, looking at everything except it.

Finally, Darcy gently but implacably draws him over in front of it.

“Best friends since childhood, Barnes and Rogers were inseparable on both schoolyard and battlefield…” intones the voiceover for the documentary video playing on repeat next to the display case containing a couple of his personal items—a photo of his family (dog-eared and faded), a carved wooden bird (he’d taken up whittling out of sheer boredom in the trenches), a letter from his ma, and a half-finished reply to it that he’d left in his footlocker before the fateful train mission.

“Barnes is the only Howling Commando to give his life in service to his country,” finishes the voiceover, and the screen fades to black with Bucky’s name and a range of dates—his birth and death—before starting another replay.  Bucky watches the old black and white footage of he and Steve laughing, jaw tightening.  Standing as close as she is to him, she can tell that he is trembling minutely, deeply affected by the exhibit.  She winds her arm around his more snugly.  After a long moment, Bucky turns them away from the display and leads them out of the museum.

They quietly walk down the Mall toward the Washington Monument, slipping easily around the crowds of tourists that have begun to appear.  They pause in the green space surrounding the monument.  Or, more specifically, Bucky just stops walking suddenly, his gaze a million miles away.  Darcy stops too, mostly because her arm is still looped around his.

“Bucky?”

“I’m… with you… to the end of the line,” he says, more to himself, voice nearly inaudible.  Darcy’s grip on him tightens.

“Bucky?  Did you remember something?”

He turns his face to hers and her breath catches at the tears in his eyes.  “They said he was dead.”

“Everyone thought he was.”

“But he wasn’t.  And then they sent _me_ to kill him.  I… I shot at him.  I tried to stab him.  I almost broke his neck!”  Bucky’s words are coming fast and low, like his breath.  His expression is twisted in pain and fear.  “Oh God, all those people.  I killed them.  Oh God.”

Darcy’s heart breaks at the anguish in his voice.  She pulls him down into her, pressing his face to the juncture of her shoulder and neck, slipping her arms around his shoulders.  His hands come up to clutch at the back of her shirt.  She can feel the damp warmth of his panting breath and his tears on her skin.

“It’s going to be okay, Bucky.  It’s going to be okay.”

This is an unwise place to have a very visible break down.  People are looking at them, noticing them.  They should leave.  She should get Bucky out of view.  Instead, Darcy just sings to Bucky softly, gently stroking the hair at the nape of his neck.  She can’t… She doesn’t want to make him stop, bottle up his emotions again.  She _knows_ that attention is dangerous, but she just _can’t_ take this catharsis away.

“Everything alright here, ma’am?” asks a male voice with the weight of authority.  Bucky stiffens a little in her arms, but doesn’t move.  Darcy twists her head slightly.  A police officer.

“Sorry,” she says, thinking fast.  Her eyes cut significantly to Bucky’s scruffy head, tucked into her shoulder.  “Just having a difficult moment.  He’s a veteran.”

The officer’s face softens with understanding.  “My brother served.  Do you need to call anyone?”

Bucky’s calming, probably in response to the officer’s presence.  His conditioning would require him to be in control of himself around people like the police, so he doesn’t arouse suspicion.

“No, I think we’ll be fine.  Thank you, Officer,” Darcy says.  After she says so, Bucky releases his death grip on her shirt, and steps slightly away.  He keeps his face turned away from the policeman, but it probably reads as embarrassment rather than evasion.

“If you’re sure,” says the officer.

“Yes, I think so.  Thank you.”

The man tips his hat at them.  “Alright.  You both have a good day, now.”

He meanders away, to continue his patrol of the Mall, presumably.  Darcy watches, but he doesn’t touch the radio clipped to his shoulder.  Just a conscientious policeman, then, not HYDRA or anything else.  Darcy lets out a breath she hadn’t known she’d been holding, and looks up at Bucky.

“Maybe we should—” she cuts off at the look on Bucky’s face, or rather, the absence thereof.  His expression is as blank and flat as it had ever been as the Soldier, and Darcy’s heart sinks in her chest.  His empty eyes turn to stare at her, waiting neither patiently or impatiently for her to finish her thought.  He’s retreated behind his mask again.  She licks her lips and swallows.  “Maybe we should find somewhere to lay low.  Were we going to go back to the industrial district?”

He shakes his head nearly imperceptibly.  “We spent too long there already.  We need a new safehouse.”

Darcy agrees easily; they hadn’t left anything behind in the abandoned building, and finding a new place to lay low will help calm Bucky down.  She disengages from him—when he slips back into the Soldier, he doesn’t like when he doesn’t have both arms free when they’re out in the open—but his flesh hand snags one of hers, gripping palm-to-palm.  Fondness and relief fill Darcy with warmth and she laces her fingers between his, and they walk off hand-in-hand.

* * *

Darcy wakes to the scratch of a pencil on paper and blearily lifts her head off of the wadded-up jacket serving as her pillow.  Bucky is seated against the wall nearby, sunlight slanting across him from the boarded-up window kitty-corner to them.  He has a notebook open on his lap and he’s writing feverishly in it.  She can see words hastily scrawled across the opposite page.  There are two notebooks in front of him, covers lifted with the slight stiffness of being new, revealing that both notebooks have been filled already.  Pieces of paper stick up between pages at what seems like random.

She sits up, watching as Bucky shades in the quick sketch of a woman he’d drawn.  She glances at the notebooks, the scissors, and the scotch-tape scattered in front of him.  He must have gone out again while she slept, bought these things.  The pamphlet advertising the Captain America exhibit has been cut up, the remnants piled limply on the floor.

“May I?” she asks, hand hovering over a notebook.  Bucky grunts, not looking up.  She takes that as permission, and pages it open.

_James Buchanan Barnes_

_“Bucky”_

_Steve_

_Darcy_

_…_

The list of names continues down two columns, hitting on his sisters, parents, the Howling Commandos, famous actors or baseball players or politicians.  There are little notes scribbled by some, questions, memories.

Darcy pages through the notebook, sees fragments of memories written out, some sketched roughly, pictures cut from the Captain America pamphlet taped in.

_Steve_

_Stevie_

_I thought you were dead_

_I thought you were smaller_

_Punk_

It’s a welter of memories, emotions, Bucky’s life laid out in pieces, jumping from place to time in a stream of consciousness.  Names and events written down as they’re remembered.

There’s a drawing of her, standing in snow, head tipped back to stare up.  Her surroundings are blurry, vague pencil suggestions, but every detail of her unbound hair and wings-dress has been carefully rendered.  It’s drawn from a low perspective, and Darcy realizes that it’s his memory of the first time he’d seen her.

“Bucky,” she starts, hesitating.  “Bucky, how much do you remember?”

He glances up, sees what she’s looking at, and lifts his head fully, pencil stilling.  “I can remember images, mostly.  I don’t always know what they mean.  That—” he points to the drawing with his pencil “—I remember that you looked like that.  But I don’t remember where, or when, or why.”

Darcy fingers the edge of the page.  “What about… What do you remember about Steve?”

Bucky’s face does something complicated, and then he ducks his head back down, inspecting the pencil’s dulled tip.  There’s a sharpener and a pile of shavings on the floor next to him.  Darcy waits.

“I remember that he’s my best friend.  My brother.” Bucky takes a breath.  “And I remember that I tried to kill him.  I shot his friend.”

Bucky’s grip tightened on the pencil, and it snaps in his hand.  He stares at the splinters.  “I killed so many people.  For _HYDRA_.  He’ll never forgive me.”

Darcy moves before she even thinks, wrapping her fingers around his wrist.  “Bucky, _no_.  Of course he’ll forgive you; there’s nothing to forgive.  None of this was your fault.”

“But I still did it,” he says softly.

“Your body may have,” Darcy says.  Concern for him is like a second heartbeat in her chest, throbbing.  “But your mind, your _soul_ , did not.  And please believe me when I say that is the more important part.  They had to nearly kill you to make you into what they wanted.  Chain your soul in your mind so that you wouldn’t get in the way of what they wanted your body to do.”

Bucky’s head dips lower, hiding his face behind his hair.  Darcy knows guilt.  She’s seen it often enough, in the souls she’s Shepherded and in the memories she’d shared with Bucky.  She knows that guilt can be the quick-fading prick of consciousness after a small lie, or the consuming agony of having failed a loved one.  She knows that some people only need to be forgiven by someone to let go their guilt, while others can never find peace unless they forgive themselves.  She knows that Bucky is one of the former.  She also knows that he’s not inclined to ever forgive himself, carrying the weight of what HYDRA had made him do like it’s penance for not being able to stop them from using him.

Steve would help.  He’d never believe that everything that has happened is Bucky’s fault.  He’d join his voice with Darcy’s, help pave the path for Bucky to forgive himself.

“We should find Steve,” she says.  “He can help you.  Us.”

“ _No_.” They both look surprised at the vehemence in Bucky’s voice, but he also looks briefly terrified, before he schools his expression into firmness.  “Not… not yet.  I can’t—I can’t—”

“He’s knows you’re here, right?  I mean, alive?” Darcy asks.  Bucky nods hesitantly.  “Then he’ll be looking for you.  He’ll want to find you, Bucky.  You’re _his_ best friend, too.”

“Yeah,” he says, nearly inaudible.  “Yeah.  Just.  Not yet.”

He’s afraid.  And hurting, and Darcy can’t blame him for being either.  So she subsides, willing to go along with him for now.  “Yeah.  Okay, Bucky.  Not yet.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have a lot of feelings about Bucky's apartment in Civil War, particularly about his memory notebooks and the pile of chocolate wrappers. My poor, precious cinnamon roll.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry sorry sorry! I didn't intend to go so long without an update, but I got really sick last week (like, my husband was dithering over whether I needed medical help to lower my fever kind of sick), and then halfway through the chapter I decided I wanted to rewrite it... twice. Finally made it do what I wanted, mostly.

They break into a HYDRA safehouse after a couple days, needing to bathe and replenish their stock of money and clothes.  They stay only as long as they need to shower, change, and put together a duffle bag of spare clothes and anything else they thought they might need or want.  Bucky had tucked several bundles of banknotes into the bag, along with three guns and ammunition.  Darcy had added soap, shampoo, and a brush and hairties (she has learned that she very much enjoys showers, and that her hair will form terrible snarls if left to its own devices).  The bag is so heavy Darcy can’t lift it, so Bucky trades it for the backpack full of his memory notebooks, slinging the duffle over his shoulder easily.  Darcy gingerly shrugs into the backpack, feeling it press on her wings.  It doesn’t hurt, thankfully.

“Where are we going now?” Darcy asks, as Bucky douses the safehouse’s carpets with gasoline.  He herds her to the door, his muscular bulk blocking out her view.  She still hears the scratch-hiss of a match being struck, however, and the _whoomp_ of the gasoline catching when he drops the match on it.

He hustles them away from the former safehouse before the fire is noticed, bundling her and their bags into the car he’d hotwired to get them there in the first place.  He slides into the driver’s seat and wastes no time getting them moving, though he drives calmly and within the speed limit—he knows better than to catch police attention by driving like an idiot.

Darcy doesn’t think he’s forgotten or is ignoring her question.  There’s a thoughtful sort of quality to his silence, like he doesn’t really know the answer but is trying to find it for her.  Darcy waits.

Finally, Bucky says lowly: “Virginia.”

Darcy looks at him.  He keeps his eyes on the road.  “We’re going to Virginia.”

“Okay,” she says.  They’re silent a long moment, then Darcy asks: “What’s Virginia?”

Bucky makes a noise, apparently involuntarily, and looks at her incredulously.  She blinks back at him.  She suspects that ‘Virginia’ is a place, as he had used it to answer her question of where they were going, but she has never worried about countries or borders before—death has no nation—and has no idea how far it is from their currently location.  Bucky seems to realize this, because he doesn’t comment on her ignorance.  His brow lowers a little and he gets an expression on his face that she can’t quite parse, but all he says is: “We’ll need to stop, trade cars, in a few miles.”

“Can we turn on the radio?” she asks.  As a response, Bucky reaches forward for the controls, tuning it to the first music station he finds.  It’s a strange mix of songs, bouncing from acoustic guitars to a lot of sounds Darcy doesn’t recognize from the music she’s heard in Bucky’s memories or what small snippets she’s heard while following the Soldier.  She likes it, though, all of it.  She likes mechanistic buzzing and thumping, how the low beat vibrates the car around them.  She likes the soft songs that are little more than voices and a trim melody on violin.  She likes the way the songs can sound like they’re crying, or laughing.  She likes the way they make her body want to move.  She wishes she could dance like she’d seen Bucky dancing, all those years ago, clasping hands with a smiling partner, feet stepping and legs kicking.  She wants to be alive, like they were.

Bucky pulls their car into a large, busy parking lot.  “Take everything; we’re not coming back.”

They take a bus further into town, to a store with another large parking lot.  Distancing themselves, Darcy understands, from the dropped car, so that when it is found, the newly stolen car they take now won’t be immediately connected to it.

“Wait here,” Bucky says, and goes into the store.  Darcy sits on a bench near the door, tilting her face up to the sun and closing her eyes.  It makes sweat prickle on her brow, and leaves spots dancing in front of her eyes even through her eyelids.

When he comes back, Bucky has two plastic bags looped over one arm.  He pauses beside her, looking down at her, and then reaches out and brushes over her sun-pinked cheek with the backs of his human fingers.

“The sun is so warm,” she tells him, smiling.  “I never knew it was so warm.”

He drags a bottle of water out of one of the bags, presses it into her hand, and then helps her up from the bench.

“Drink,” he says, as he leads her into the parking lot.  She cracks the seal on the cap and takes a sip, shivering at the feel of the cool water trickling down the back of her throat as she follows Bucky down an aisle of cars.

She’s not entirely certain by what criteria he chooses which to steal—the age and model must play some role, making a car easier to break into or less noticeable.  They stop at one, a bland grey sedan.  He uses his metal arm to surreptitiously wrench open the driver’s-side door, essentially ripping the lock out with a brief, hard tug.  He hits the unlock for the other doors, and Darcy slips into the passenger seat as he ducks under the steering column to hotwire the car.  It’s soon sputtering to life.  Bucky folds back the ragged metal of the door so that it can be securely shut once more, and then they’re pulling out of the parking lot and heading onward.

“I got you something,” Bucky says after a while.  Darcy blinks at him from behind the water bottle.  “In the bags.  A book.”

She digs through them until she finds it.  World Atlas.  She laughs, delighted.  It’s a book of maps.  There’s one of the United States of America, and she can see the wiggly little jigsaw-piece of Virginia along the right side of the country.  At the corner of her eye, she sees the line of Bucky’s shoulders relax at her laughter.  “Virginia, one of fifty states of the United States of America.  I understand.  Oh!  Where is ‘Washington D.C.’?”

“That one ain’t a state,” Bucky says, a little bit of his old accent coloring the words as he relaxes a little more.  “It’s just a city.  North of Virginia, along the coast.”

“Ah,” Darcy says, finding it.  She lets her pointing finger trail up the page.  “Here’s New York City.”

She contemplates that little dot for a moment, knowing at least that Brooklyn is there, that Bucky’s history is there.  She wonders, briefly, why they aren’t going there.  Surely it would help Bucky to remember.  But maybe he’s afraid that Steve would find them there; it is also Steve’s history, after all.

She touches their destination again.  “What are we going to do in Virginia?”

Bucky doesn’t look away from the road.  “Start to make things right.”

* * *

The first motel room is dim and Darcy’s a little wary of sitting on the bed.  Something of her distaste or discomfort must translate to her face, because Bucky says: “Don’t worry, we aren’t staying here.”

“What are we doing here, then?”

With the duffle of their clothes and one of the plastic bags from the store in hand, Bucky goes into the little bathroom and flicks the light on.  “HYDRA puts trackers in the safehouse clothes.  We need to kill them.  Here, change back into these.”

Darcy accepts the clothes he’d gotten back in DC, the first ones, not those from the safehouse.  They’re still dirty, but not disgustingly so, just a little rumpled and smelling of sweat.  She strips out of what she’s wearing, remembering this time to go into the other room, giving Bucky the privacy to change his own clothes, though he doesn’t bother closing the bathroom door.  Well, they’re getting better at this, anyway.

“Here,” Darcy says, bundling the HYDRA clothes together and setting them on the pile of other clothes Bucky’d pulled from the duffle.  He’s faster at changing, and is already plugging the bathtub and filling it with cold water.  “Can I stay and watch?”

“Yes.  Just don’t put your bare hands in this stuff,” he replies, pulling on a pair of nitrile gloves.  He pulls three bottles out of the plastic bag and starts pouring them into the tub, eyeballing the amounts.  He mixes the liquids with one gloved hand, carefully swirling but not splashing.  He peers down at the tub for a moment before whatever he sees satisfies him, and he grabs one of the shirts and dips it.

Darcy, almost expecting sizzling or even smoke, is a little disappointed when nothing happens.  She scrunches her nose at the tub.  “How do you know this will work?”

“This doesn’t kill the bugs,” he tells her absently.  “This just dissolves the waterproofing coating on them; we’ll soak them in just water after this, and that will short them out.”

“Oh.” Darcy watches him dip the rest of their clothes, setting them aside in the sink until he’s done and then draining the tub, using one of the motel room’s plastic cups to rinse the sides thoroughly before filling the tub again with warm water and dumping the clothes in.  He pushes them down into the water so that they’re all completely wet before he takes off the gloves and drops them into the trash.

“We’ll let them sit for five minutes, then we need to leave.”

* * *

They drive several more hours after, through the night and into the next day, stopping only to relieve themselves and to buy food that they can take and eat in the car.  When they finally stop again, the motel is just as small as the last, but clean.  Like he had at the last one, Bucky puts the chain on the door right away, and pulls the curtains shut.  He checks every last nook and cranny in the room before he gestures all-clear.  Darcy sets the backpack onto the bed.

“I’m going to take our clothes to a laundromat,” Bucky says.  The HYDRA safehouse clothes had been stuffed gracelessly into a plastic bag while still wet, and they’d both been able to smell the mustiness permeating the air in the car.  “I’ll also grab some food on the way.”

“I’ll come with,” Darcy says.  Bucky shakes his head.

“No, stay here.” His eyes flick around the room.  “Try to find some news on the TV, see what they’re saying about DC.  Or HYDRA.  We’ll need to know if anything happens.”

Darcy doesn’t really want to be separated, not with HYDRA possibly hunting them.  But she guesses that he has a point.  She’s not happy about it, but… “Fine.”

Bucky nods.  “I’ll be back in a while.  Lock the door while I’m gone, and don’t open it for anyone.”

He takes the backpack with the sodden clothes in it with him.  Darcy can hear him wait on the other side of the door for her to lock it.  His footsteps start fading away as she slips the chain into place.

Inspection of the TV yields a couple discrete buttons on the side.  She hits the one marked ‘power’, and the screen comes to life with a crackle of static and some sudden, sedate piano music.  It shows a few boxes with text inside them, one welcoming her to the motel chain and one marked ‘menu’.  There’s a list of numbers and words which make no sense to her.  She tries the buttons again, finds a set that make the TV louder, and then a set that change the pictures.  She flicks through the stations until the words “Breaking News” catch her eye, scrolling along the bottom of the screen.

News.  Like Bucky’d said.  Darcy watches as the two people sitting behind the desk on the screen talk about the clean up in DC in the wake of the ‘attack by the terrorist group HYDRA’.  Apparently, when Steve had blown their cover, HYDRA had attempted to launch a decisive attack on SHIELD and other ‘enemies of HYDRA’.  Steve and SHIELD had put a stop to it, but had dropped three large helicarriers on the city in the process.

They talk about how nine new government officials have been taken into FBI or SHIELD custody as HYDRA operatives or as having accepted bribes from HYDRA.  They talk about the consequences of discovering that a terrorist organization has been working inside most if not all the branches of the government and governmental organizations.  They talk about who should take the blame for the destruction caused by the helicarriers—SHIELD had built them, HYDRA had tried to use them, and Captain America had crashed them.

Darcy listens and watches until the programming changes to baseball highlights.  She doesn’t see the Brooklyn Dodgers, and Bucky isn’t back yet, so she starts clicking through the stations again.  There are a lot of them, a couple dozen at least.  She doesn’t remember when TVs became as ubiquitous as they are now; she remembers everyone just listened to the radio in Bucky’s memories, and after he fell into HYDRA’s clutches, there’d been little reason he’d be near a TV, let alone watching one.  She’d seen them in passing as they’d cruised through his missions, but had never sat and watched one like she does now.

She’s surprised by what she finds.  She might not know TV, but she knows _stories_ , and there are a lot of them on the TV.  She flips past colorful children’s stories done up like moving drawings, fantastical stories of humans traveling amongst the stars, dreamy stories of love… She is lost in them, drinking them up.  Stories are one of the things humans made that she has always admired.  The sheer number of stories unfolding on the screen at the push of a button nearly distracts her from the clock, which tells her that it’s been hours since Bucky’d left.

How long does it take to do laundry and pick up something to eat?  Did he have to go far to find a place to do those things?  What if—?

A knock on the door jolts Darcy from working herself into a lather.  She freezes, uncertain.  The TV is on; can they hear it through the door?  Should she just ignore it?  “Doll, it’s me.”

Bucky!  She scrambles up, just barely remembers to check the peephole, just in case, and unchains and unlocks the door.  Bucky comes through with the duffle slung over his shoulder and a pizza-box in his hands.

“Bucky!” she says.  “TV is awesome!  It’s like the cinema, except so much more!  Look, I’m watching a movie now!  It’s called ‘Hook’.”

He puts the pizza-box down on the motel room’s tiny desk, eyeing the colorful foodfight that is unfolding on the screen.  “What’s it about?”

They end up watching it together, sitting against the bed’s headboard, feet splayed in front of them, pizza between them.  Darcy whispers ‘Bangarang’ into her pizza slice, and laughs at the antics of the Lost Boys.  When Hook stabs Rufio, she gasps and leaps to her feet, shock and horror on her face she looks between the TV and Bucky.  “No!  Bucky!  No!  He _didn’t_!”

“It’s just a movie, he’s not really dead,” Bucky says, brow furrowing.

“The _actor_ is alive, but the _character_ is dead.  It’s still sad,” she insists, eyes prickling with tears.  Bucky blinks at her.

“Darcy,” he says, expression gentling.  Darcy presses her face in his chest, sniffling.  Bucky’s arms are strong and warm around her shoulders, and she can hear his heart beating beneath her cheek.  She understands abruptly why some humans like hugs so much; it’s extremely reassuring, comforting, to feel the life and warmth of someone holding you.  She hears him say, very softly into her hair: “You’re too good, doll.”

“No’m not,” she mumbles.  “‘M death.”

“Just the gentle part of it,” he tells her.  “Just that.”

But that’s not entirely true anymore, is it?  Darcy shivers, remembering.  “I was gentle because I chose to be.  I've never _had_ to comfort the dying, and you saw what I did to that man in the vault.”

“You are gentler than I am,” Bucky says.

“And that was through no choice of yours.”  Darcy is firm.  He huffs a breath into her hair, and doesn’t argue.  Darcy hopes it’s because she’s wearing him down, making him believe that the guilt that weigh him down is not his to carry, but she expects that he simply doesn’t want to argue with her.

That’s fine.  She’ll keep trying.

Darcy snuggles down into his arms to watch the rest of the movie, and he lets her.

* * *

It’s midmorning, the sun leaking around the pulled curtains, when Darcy wakes.  She does so slowly, groggily, stirring sleepily under the covers.  The motel room is quiet; all Darcy can hear is the traffic on the nearby road through the window.  She sits up.

“Bucky?”  He’s not in the room, and the bathroom is open and empty.  She gets up, rubbing her eyes.  She glances out the window furtively; the car’s gone.  Darcy’s very awake now, heart beginning to pound.

Maybe he’s just running out to get them food, or supplies.

But he wouldn’t have needed his stolen Kevlar vest if he was just getting them supplies.  He wouldn’t have needed all the weapons from the duffle bag.

Darcy sits down hard on the foot of the bed, staring at the limp and empty duffle on the floor.

He’s gone.  He’s gone, somewhere, with the intention of fighting.

And he’s left her behind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I decided I liked the phrasing "I'm with you to the end of the line" better than "'til the end of the line". Any previous instances have been changed, and that's how it'll be going forward. Don't care if it's what the script says or not, I like it better. I do what I want, Thor!


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter brought to you by: the migraine that tried to make it not happen. Eff you, migraine.
> 
> Thanks bunches for all your kudos and comments, everyone. Even if I don't answer all of them, know that I really appreciate each and every one.

Darcy sits in the motel room and tries not to panic.  She doesn’t think he’s completely abandoned her; he wouldn’t have left without warning her if that were the case.  HYDRA might be looking for her, too.  He wouldn’t just leave her.  He’ll be back… as long as whatever he’s doing doesn’t get him killed.

The blood in her veins is ice, and her wings shiver and shift against her skin.

_ No _ .  He’ll be back.  He can’t die.

But what if he needs help?  She might not have been terribly helpful when she’d been unable to touch him, but she’d still been there, been able to keep watch while he rested, been able to direct him to safety.  And now that she’s firmly in this world, she could help him fight, help if he is injured and has to dig bullets out of himself.

Darcy leans over and puts her head between her knees, terror surging.  But she can’t do any of that if she’s _not_ _with him_.  She jerks to her feet and paces to the wall in three sharp steps, spins, and stalks back.  She’s angry and worried, feeling sick with the strength of the emotions.

Bucky’d left a box of granola bars on the desk, and Darcy growls at them, baring her teeth.  So kind of him to make sure she doesn’t starve while he’s out there  _ possibly dying _ .

Darcy’s wings finally break from her control, unfurling and ripping her shirt apart with a loud noise.  She curses when they knock over a lamp, the granola bars, and the desk’s pen and paper-pad.  Her tattered shirt and little tufts of blue-black down flutter to the floor, and she curses again, voice shaking.  Wings flared out behind her, she sits on the bed and curses again, this time little more than a sob.

She doesn’t know how long he’s been gone.  After the movie had finished and they’d gone to sleep—or, Darcy had gone to sleep at least—it had been after midnight.  He’d left some point after that, and some time before Darcy’d woken up.  It could have been hours ago, or minutes.  She has no idea.  Which also means that she has no idea where he is.  How far away he could be.

There’s nothing she can do except to wait and hope he comes back.

Darcy’s wings wrap around her in a shivering curtain of feathers, enfolding her in darkness and the scent of rosemary and rue.  Pressing her palms over her eyes, she breathes raggedly.  And waits.

* * *

The sound of a key engaging the lock almost doesn’t rouse her from the dazed stupor she falls into.  The recognition of the sound and what it means hits her at the same time Bucky’s voice does.  “Darcy?”

Her wings open in a susurration of shifting feathers.  Bucky stands just inside the door, looking at her with a furrowed brow.  He’s wearing his black tactical pants and boots, and the jacket he’d stolen in DC, though by virtue of familiarity Darcy can tell he’s wearing Kevlar and has guns strapped to him beneath it.

“Bucky?” she asks, voice small.  She sees his expression start to morph into one of alarm as she bursts into tears and throws herself at him.  He catches her, trying to keep her from smashing her face against the semi-automatic strapped to his chest.  She still manages to press pretty tightly to him, feeling the hard edge of the gun against her cheek as her arms go around his waist and her wings envelope them both.

“Doll, you’re gettin’ all dirty,” Bucky says, a little desperate, and Darcy realizes that the very familiar scent of blood is thick around him.  She jerks back, trying to blink tears out of her eyes so she can see.  She scans him more intently now, noting where the grey of his jacket is darker with blood.  Some of it has smeared across her collarbone, down her bare chest.  Her breath catches.

“You’re hurt!”

Bucky catches her hands when she tries to pat at his side, where the grey of his jacket is stained darker with blood.  “Don’t.  I’m fine; it’s just a graze, it’ll heal in a couple hours.”

“But that’s a lot of blood!”

“It’s already stopped bleeding,” Bucky says.  “Come on, Darcy, please.”

She realizes that he’s trying to pull her to the bathroom, hands gentle but insistent on her wrists.  She goes, tears steadily dripping down her cheeks.  “You left.  Bucky, you left and I didn’t know where you were.”

He pauses in the middle of wetting down a washcloth, then slowly resumes, squeezing out the excess and gently blotting the blood off her.  He keeps his head down, avoiding her gaze as she stares at him.

“You were shot the last time we faced HYDRA,” he says quietly.  “You’d be in danger again if I brought you with me.”

“I can fight!” Darcy says.  She reaches out, grabbing his jacket and smearing blood on her fingers.  “Please, Bucky, I can fight.  Please, don’t leave me alone again.”

Bucky detaches her hands from his jacket and cleans off her fingers, his jaw tense and a dark look in his eyes.  “Darcy, you’re not a soldier.  You’re not equipped to do what I do.”

“I don’t care!  Bucky,  _ please _ .  I didn’t know where you were, if you were okay, if you’d been hurt, or killed.  Please,  _ please _ .  I can fight, I can… I can kill.  I’ll do whatever I have to if I can stay with you.”  Words fall from her lips, and she’s crying again.

Bucky’s nostrils flare and a muscle stands out briefly along his jaw.  “This wasn’t like in the vault.  To fight to escape is entirely different from fighting to ensure an enemy cannot continue to wage war.  There are no half-measures here.  You are untrained, and your only weapon is touch.  How do you expect to get close enough without getting shot?”

“What happens when  _ you  _ get shot?” she whispers.  Bucky finally looks her in the eye, looking startled.  “I was  _ there _ , Bucky.  Every time, for the last seven decades.  I watched you dig bullets out from between your ribs after the riots in Northern Ireland.  I watched you cauterize the gash in your thigh after the shrapnel in Afghanistan.  Please don’t ask me to sit and wait, wondering if you’re hurt again, if you’ve been killed this time, when I’m not there.”

Bucky is silent, wetting his lips briefly as his brow furrows, before he finally says: “I’m not going to bring you into a combat situation when you have no way to defend yourself.”

“I—”

He interrupts her with a severe look.  “You’re not a soldier, and I’m not going to make you one.”

Darcy bites her lip, understanding where his vehemence comes from, but not wanting to give up.  “I don’t want to be a soldier,” she tells him.  “But I also don’t want to be left behind.”

A drop of pinkish water drips from the washcloth he holds just over her skin, sliding down the curve of her breast.  She shivers from the cool trail it leaves, before abruptly remembering the human rules of nudity.  From the startled look on his face, and the way he jerks his hand back, Bucky has been struck with the same sudden thought.  Darcy grabs the washcloth and turns her back to him, wings folding up close to her so they don’t hit anything. Bucky clears his throat, and Darcy can tell by the quality of the sound—it doesn’t echo against the bathroom’s tile—that he’s turned into the doorway, looking out at the room.

“What about a radio?”

“What?” Darcy cleans the last of the blood off herself, and turns to drop the now stained washcloth into the sink, wings slipping around her like a cloak to cover her nakedness.  Bucky is leaning against the doorjamb, facing away from her.  He glances back, swiftly, then turns around when he sees she’s covered.

“If you wore a radio,” he taps his ear, “and listened as I completed my missions.  Would that be enough?”

Ah.  They’re compromising.  Darcy chews on her lip, wincing a little when it proves tender after all the times her teeth have found it recently.  “I… I don’t like that you’d be alone.”

“I wouldn’t be,” he says.  “I’d have you in my ear, too.”

Darcy thinks about it.  “I’d know where you are?  You wouldn’t—I’d know where, and I’d be able to listen in?  I could talk to you?”

“If that’s what you want.”

What she wants is to be beside him, but she’s accepted that he’ll never allow it.  “Okay,” she says.  “That’s… It’s better than not knowing.”

He exhales like he’s relieved, and maybe he is.  She isn’t entirely oblivious; she’d noticed how quickly he’d pushed to get the blood cleaned off her, like he couldn’t stand to see it.  She thinks she knows why, but she doesn’t really  _ understand _ .  She’s a Shepherd.  She’s seen more gruesome things, and she can’t imagine he doesn’t know that.

He moves out of the doorway, and waves her though.  “I need to clean up.”

“Your wound,” Darcy protests.  “Do you need to—?”

“It really is just a graze,” he tells her, but he shrugs out of his jacket and Kevlar and lifts his undershirt so she can see it.  He’s right, the bullet didn’t catch much of him, but it still tore a divot in his side.  A line of raw, red skin.  It’s not bleeding anymore, and Darcy suspects that the blood smeared all over him and his clothes looks like more than it really is.  He doesn’t show any signs of severe or even mild blood-loss.  She feels briefly weak with relief.

“You’re okay,” she says, and closes her eyes.   _ He’s okay.  _ _ He came back, and he’s okay. _

“Darcy?” She opens her eyes to see him take a worried step closer.  “Is… I-I’m sorry.  For not telling you.  I didn’t think you’d worry.”

Darcy looks at him, looks at the way his eyes slide around her, uneasy, uncertain.  The line of his shoulders tense.  “I share your memories, do you know?” she asks.  “I’ve lived almost every moment of your life right beside you, though unseen.  I watched you take care of your sisters, tease Steve, fall in love.  I know that you stole aspirin for Steve when you were fifteen, when neither of you could afford it but Steve’s flu got too bad and he needed it.  I know that the first time you were in battle, you didn’t make a single shot because your hands were shaking too much, but you were almost relieved because that meant you weren’t a killer yet.  I know that you tried not to sleep for as long as possible after Steve rescued you from Azzano because you thought it was a dream and you’d wake up back in the labs.  I know you, James Buchanan Barnes, and I care about you.  I know you’re a good man, and deserving of better than what you were given.”

Something complicated and sad passes over his face, but Darcy continues before he can protest.  “Do you remember what you and Steve used to say to each other?  ‘I’m with you to the end of the line.’  Me too, Bucky.  Me too.  I’m with you.”

His pupils dilate as he stares at her, his adam’s-apple bobbing as he swallows.  His voice is hoarse when he says: “To the end of the line, doll.”

“Yes,” she agrees, a promise.

* * *

They don’t stay in Virginia long after Bucky destroys the HYDRA base.  Darcy sees it on the news the next day—it’s reported as a gas-explosion and fire, in what had luckily been an ‘abandoned factory’.  While Bucky watches the footage of firefighters futilely battling the blaze with an expression of grim satisfaction, Darcy folds her clothes up and tucks them into the backpack.  Bucky’d already been awake when she’d gotten up, dressed and packed and watching the TV on mute.  She’s not actually sure whether he’d slept at all, but the serum he’d been given made it easier for him to skimp on sleep, and he’d been conditioned to push past even that augmented limit.  He doesn’t seem tired at all.

“Where are we going next?” she asks, zipping up the pack.  Bucky clicks off the TV and stands.

“Ohio.”

Darcy nods; while they’d driven to Virginia, she’d spent some time with the atlas he’d given her and now knew the names of all the states, and a lot of countries as well.  She recognized the Alps in Europe as the mountain range where Bucky had fallen, where they’d met.  The Smithsonian had had a map, marked to show the missions Captain America and the Howling Commandos had taken.  The train mission where Bucky had ‘died’ had been on there.  Austria.  

She wonders at all the places she’s been without ever knowing the names.  Austria, America, England, France, Poland… So many, and that is only taking into account the time she remembers.  What places had she been to before her memory starts, before she’d become Darcy?  Which was the first?

“Darcy?” Bucky’s waiting for her, hand on the doorknob.  She flashes a smile at him and slings the backpack over her shoulder.  She waits until they’re in the car and an hour down the road before she asks:

“Are we going after another HYDRA base?”

“Yes.” Bucky’s expression is wary, a hint of stubbornness in the angle of his chin.  But Darcy just nods.

“How many bases are there?”

“In the US, that I know of?  Seven.  But that’s only a fraction of the real number, and there are others around the world.”

So many.  Worried, Darcy asks: “Are we going to go after all of them?”

He hesitates.  “I don’t know.”

Darcy fidgets in her seat, twisting her fingers together and staring at them in her lap.  “Steve is probably hunting down HYDRA, too.”

She can pretty much hear Bucky’s jaw tighten, but he replies easily enough: “He’d never be able to resist.”

“You’re going to catch his attention, taking out bases like this,” she warns him.  Bucky lets out a long breath and doesn’t answer for a while.

“Yeah,” he says finally, quietly.  “I know.”

* * *

Ohio is hot, and dry, their news anchors talking about a drought— _ worst we’ve seen in a decade, isn’t it, Kathy? _ —and the restrictions the government is placing to minimize the dangers— _ asking folks to limit water use, just let those yards die, and to not burn brush outside _ .  Bucky scowls darkly at the TV.  The drought means he won’t be able to dispose of the base in the manner he’d prefer (which involves large amounts of explosions), or else he might set the state on fire.  The base in Virginia had burned for hours, despite the combined efforts of three townships’ fire departments.  That sort of blaze can very easily get out of control in the circumstances in Ohio.

Bucky spends some time developing an op plan and gathering materials.  He does some preliminary recon on the base, and comes back cold and remote, closed off behind the Winter Soldier.  Darcy’s not sure if that’s a good sign, or a bad one.

The third day they’re in Ohio, Bucky teaches her how to use the two-part radio he’d acquired.  It has a small speaker that fits into her ear, and a microphone that goes around her throat.  As she lets Bucky fasten it around her, she looks at the equipment laid out in careful order on the bed over his shoulder and knows that the attack will be tonight.  Her pulse is thundering with nerves, and she’s well aware that he can probably see it throb in her carotid.

His hands are gentle as he settles the microphone just-so against her throat.  “I’ll go out to the car and we can test the sensitivity.  If it’s too loud or too quiet, you can control the volume of the ear-piece with this dial.”

He tucks the excess cord connecting the ear-piece and the throat mic into her shirt, but leaves the little bit where the volume control is attached outside.  She lifts her hand and runs her fingers over it, familiarizing herself with the shape and size of it.  The dial has a serrated edge to make turning it easier, and Darcy clicks a few notches in each direction.

Bucky quickly and efficiently packs up his weapons and other supplies and hikes the bag up.  “I’m bringing this out to the car; I’ll try to hail you when I’m out there.”

She nods and he leaves, and a minute later, the speaker in her ear crackles and Bucky’s voice—a little lower and more gravelly—comes through loud and clear.  Darcy slips the volume down a touch, then responds: “I can hear you, Bucky.  Can you hear me?”

“Got you, doll.  I’m coming back in,” he says.  Darcy stands up, feeling restless.  She thinks he’s probably going to leave soon, even though the sun is still a couple hours from setting, he will want to be in position early.

Her anxiety must show on her face.  When Bucky sees her, his brow pinches and he frowns.  “What’s wrong?”

“I’m afraid for you,” she admits softly.  He looks confused.

“Why?”

“Well, I…” Darcy bites her lip.  “I know that you’ve been trained to do this kind of thing.  And that you’ve been trained to do it alone, more or less.  But… but I’ve always been there, watching your back.  It scares me that you’re really alone now.”

Bucky’s brow lowers.  “We already—”

“I know!  I know; I don’t want to argue about this again.  I’m not going with you.  But I just… I can’t help but to worry.”  She jumps and looks up sharply when he touches her cheek, her eyes meeting his.  His expression has softened, and he looks at her with the sort of steady, confident gaze that had made the soldiers under him follow him unquestioningly during the war.

“You know what I can do,” he says.  “You know I am trained for this.  You don’t have to worry.”

Darcy gives a wry, trembling little smile.  “I know.”

He watches her a moment.  “Are you sure you want to listen in?”

“Yes!” Darcy’s eyes widen and she grips the volume control on her radio tightly.  “Please!  I don’t want to… I need to know what’s going on.”

“Okay.  Okay.”  But the wrinkle between his brows doesn’t go away.  Now she’s making him worry about her.

“I’ll be fine,” she tells him.  “Just… be careful.”

“I will,” he says, and belatedly removes his hand from cupping her jaw.  “Don’t open the door for anyone but me.  I should be back in seven hours.”

“Okay,” she says, and watches him leave.  Peeking out of the pulled curtains of the window, she watches him get into their stolen car and pull out of the motel parking lot.  Letting the curtain fall back, Darcy walks backwards until her legs hit the bed, letting her knees fold so she falls back onto the mattress.  Bedspread cool against her cheek, she presses the earbud more firmly into her ear and curls up on her side.

* * *

Listening to Bucky is simultaneously nerve-wracking and relieving.  She can hear his calm breaths, and the regular updates on the op he gives her— “I’m at the drop-off point, heading to entry point”, “Group of four enemy agents ahead, engaging now”, “Room cleared”.  It goes a long way to keeping her from panicking.  She whispers back acknowledgements, following every action he takes, hanging on each report in.

Unfortunately, along with the progress reports, she can also hear through his mic the sounds of gunfire, and the sharp exhalations he gives as he takes down enemies hand-to-hand.  Hearing the violence makes her almost unable to breathe.  It is fortunate that the microphones can pick up subvocalizations, because her throat is so tight she can barely squeak out responses when he checks in after each encounter with the enemies in the base.

It takes what feels like forever before he says: “Base cleared.  Sweeping for intel and materials.”

It means that there are no more HYDRA agents alive in the base, and that the biggest threat left is any fail-safe measures they might have implemented.  A self-destruct, a lock-down, a physical or chemical dead-hand release.  Darcy waits, knowing that, if there is one of those, it won’t take long to engage.  When one minute, and then another, ticks by uneventfully, she breathes a little easier.

Then Bucky makes a small sound, and the bottom of her stomach falls out.  She sits up quickly.  “What?  Bucky?  Are you okay?”

“I found…” his voice falters for the first time that day.  “I found my files.”

_ Oh. _  The files detailing the creation and implementation of the Winter Soldier.

His voice comes back, strong and even once more.  “Making a copy of the files.”

He’s quiet for a while, intermittent key-clatter coming through the microphone.  Darcy waits.  And waits.  Does it take this long to digitally copy files?  On the TV shows she’d watched in the last couple of days, it had seemed faster.

“What are you doing?” she asks finally.

“Locking down the system,” Bucky replies.  “SHIELD will have alerts set, if places like this are found, so when they come, they’ll be the only ones to be able to access the database.”

“Oh,” Darcy nods.  It makes sense.  She knew the plan is to bring local law enforcement down on the neutralized base by setting off several smoke-bombs outside the entrance; with all the attention that the smoke would bring (particularly with the area in a drought state of emergency), HYDRA would never be able to use the base again, its location would be thoroughly blown.  But HYDRA’s computers would be full of information too sensitive to let run-of-the-mill policemen or even FBI have.  At the same time, all that information would be useful to SHIELD and Steve, in their own attempts to clean up HYDRA.

“Lock-down set.  I’m heading outside,” Bucky says.  And then, a couple minutes later: “Smoke-bombs set.  I’m returning to the car now.”

“See you soon,” Darcy says, letting out a long breath.  But she doesn’t completely relax until he’s back in the motel room, smelling like gunpowder and the acrid stink of the smoke-bombs.

He has a few scrapes and bruises, the worst being a broken metacarpel in his human hand.  There is a little bit of blood streaked across his chin from a little cut caused by a ricochet, but the cut itself is long healed and gone.  He’s perfectly fine, at least physically.  Mentally and emotionally, however, may be a different story.

Darcy remembers with vivid clarity exactly what Bucky had endured at the hands of HYDRA, and knows that the files must detail those things with the sort of detached, clinical coldness that had twisted up Darcy’s insides witnessing first-hand.  They hadn’t treated him like a person, only a subject, an experiment, a tool.  If Bucky had read the files, or even just part of them… She can’t imagine what it feels like, to read such things about yourself.

He acts the same as usual, letting her fuss over his injuries before efficiently cleaning his gear and then himself.  He hits the lights before settling into his usual place in the chair in the corner, with sight-lines to the door and the window, weapon close to hand.  He tells her “It’s late, get some sleep” just the same as any other night.  But there is a distance in his eyes, something of him that’s far away.

She stares through the dark at him, watching the vague lines of his face, still and vigilant.  She doesn’t know what to do, but her mouth is opening before she even thinks about it.

“Bucky?” Her voice is a mere breath of sound, but he hears her, of course he hears her.  She knows he’s looking at her, and she doesn’t know what to say, so she just reaches a hand out.  A beat, and then Bucky’s fingers brush against hers.

Holding his hand in the silent dark seems like such a small, insignificant thing, but it’s all she can think to do right now.  She doesn’t have the words to make this better, easier.


	9. Chapter 9

Bucky had copied the Winter Soldier files onto a thumb drive, but they have nothing to view them on.  So on their way out of Ohio, they stop at an electronics store and use some of the money they’d taken from HYDRA’s safehouse and the bases to buy a simple laptop computer.  The store clerk’s eyes widen a little when Bucky pays for it with a few hundred-dollar-bills, but she doesn’t say anything.  It isn’t ideal, because if HYDRA is somehow tracking them, this clerk will remember the couple who’d bought a computer with cash, but it is all they have.

Bucky begins reading through his files every night, slogging through seven decades of torture and murder.  The first night, Darcy wakes up a two in the morning for some reason—maybe he’d made some small noise, or maybe she’d just sensed that he’d needed her—and finds Bucky pale and crying, staring at the motel desk as their new laptop cycles through its screensavers in front of him.  She sits up slowly, fully awake in an instant.  Bucky’s head turns toward her creakily.

“I killed Howard,” he says in a broken, little-boy-lost voice.  “And his wife.  Why?  Why would I—?  I broke conditioning for Steve, why not them?”

“ _ Bucky _ ,” Darcy says, and wraps her arms around him.  He clings to her and sobs.  “You can’t do this, Bucky.  You can’t do this to yourself.  None of this guilt is yours to carry.”

“Steve,” Bucky says between shuddering breaths.  She’s confused.

“What?”

“That’s where Steve is.  With Howard’s son.  Tony Stark.  Stark Tower.  I can never… How can I…”

“Steve will understand,” Darcy says, because there’s no way he wouldn’t.  Bucky would know this, if his grief and guilt weren’t twisting him up.  “I don’t know Tony Stark, but if he’s Steve’s friend, then he’ll understand, too.  Maybe he’ll be angry, humans are always angry about death, but I can’t believe he’d blame you.  It  _ wasn’t  _ you.  Not really.”

“It was me in the only way that matters,” Bucky says dully.  “It was my hands.”

The resignation in his voice is enough to tip over the tears that had welled in her eyes as she’d held him.  She presses her nose against the top of his head where his cheek is pressed over her heart.  “Oh, Bucky, no.”

* * *

“Are you sleeping?”

Bucky stares at her with a certain blankness that pretty much answers her question.  Darcy leans across the table of the little roadside picnic area and lifts one eyebrow.  She’d seen someone do it on that show—Star Trek—and had fallen in love with the dry inquiry suggested by the motion.  His eyes flick away.

“You know I’m not.”

It’s true.  Darcy had thought before that Bucky never slept, but that was only because she’d never seen him actually go without.  As best she can tell, he’d used to take cat naps, sleeping so lightly that the tiniest sounds roused him.  Which explains why she’d never caught him napping; he’d wake as soon as her own breathing changed as she surfaced into awareness.  It had made it seem like he didn’t sleep.  But now he  _ really _ isn’t sleeping, and she can tell.

“Is it—?” Darcy hesitates, fiddling with the wrapper of a ‘breakfast bar’ (she can’t help but compare it to the huge spreads she’s seen on TV, of pancakes with amber syrup, toast and jewel-colored fruit jams, sunshine glasses of orange juice). “Is it the dreams again?”

He’d never had dreams, before.  But reading the files HYDRA had kept on the Winter Soldier seems to wake memories in him, and the images are intrusive, thrusting him into the past whether he is waking or sleeping.  They are disruptive when he’s awake, sending him into a disoriented haze.  But when they come to him in his sleep… they’re worse.  He forgets where and who he is.  Sometimes they aren’t too bad; he wakes once thinking that he’s back in Brooklyn with Steve, remembering as soon as he opens his eyes the truth.

But sometimes, they are really bad.  He wakes expecting the chair and the orders, or he wakes in the middle of an operation.  It’s the latter that proves most problematic.  He’s never hurt Darcy—she’s always been there, and he recognizes her immediately no matter what stage of the Winter Soldier he’s trapped in—but he has almost hurt others, and almost blown up the motel they’d been staying at twice.

Bucky says nothing, but Darcy knows that the dreams are responsible for his new insomnia.  But even with his enhanced ability to remain functional on little sleep, something has to give.  He’s still human, still needs the rest.  He can’t just give up sleep entirely; eventually, the deprivation will begin to affect him.

“We’ll need to figure something out,” she says.  He grunts.  She thinks that maybe he’s getting frustrated and tired, grumpy at his perceived weakness.  In a way, it’s a good thing; HYDRA would never have let him have such an emotion.  That he does and he’s showing it proves his stolen humanity is returning.  That does little to solve the other problem, though.

“Don’t think there’s anything to do about it,” he mutters.

“You… you could stop reading the files,” she suggests delicately.  Bucky’s shaking his head almost before she finishes saying it.

“No.  I need to know.  I need to remember.”

“Yeah,” Darcy says.  “Yeah, I know.”

* * *

Las Vegas is probably the last place Darcy would have expected there to be a HYDRA base, but upon reflection it makes a little bit of sense.  There is an Air Force base nearby, so a man carrying himself like a soldier isn’t an unusual sight.  Even if it were, Las Vegas is a huge tourist destination, and with the continual flux of people coming in and going out, it’s easy to be lost in the crowd.  Nobody notices anything strange, because nobody looks long enough.

They stay in a hotel off the main Strip, but it’s still a couple levels above the usual motels they stay at.  They get a continental breakfast with the room, and Darcy gets to try all the foods she’d seen on TV.  She discovers that she really likes syrup, and drowns everything in it.

She’d probably enjoy it a lot more if she weren’t so worried about Bucky.  He hasn’t slept in four days, and she knows it’s starting to get to him.  But he’s afraid of hurting someone if he gets lost in a dream again, and refuses to sleep, or even nap.

She really hopes that it won’t affect his ability to take the HYDRA base down.  She’s getting increasingly worried that it will, that he’ll be just a little too slow, a little too fuzzy.  He’s been quieter than usual, but other than that, it hasn’t seemed to be a problem.  His reconnaissance runs have gone off without a hitch—she’d started listening in on those, too—but just because he’s okay today doesn’t mean he’s okay tomorrow.  Exhaustion builds up.  And he needs to be on the top of his game.

“I’ll be fine, doll,” Bucky says, tucking his tactical pants into the tops of his boots.  Darcy realizes she’s been worrying her lip.

“Don’t say that, that’s like asking for trouble.  Whenever someone says that on TV, they die!”

Bucky’s eyebrows rise.  “This ain’t TV, Darcy.  I’ll be fine.  I prom—”

She muffles him with her fingers across his mouth.  “Stop it!”

He blinks at her, and she knows he’s surprised by her insistence.  She  _ knows  _ that it’s irrational to believe that his words are tempting fate.  But knowing that doesn’t help with the frisson of fear that ripples up her spine.  She’d rather be irrational in this regard, than regretful if the trope proves true.

“Don’t make promises you can’t keep,” she says.  “You don’t have the power to promise that; you don’t know what will happen.  Just promise that you’ll be careful.  That’s enough.”

Bucky’s brow smooths out and he watches her a moment, eyes flicking between hers.  “Of course.  I’ll be careful.”

* * *

She knows it’s coincidence, that superstition is just superstition, but there’s a little part of her that hisses “I  _ knew  _ it!” when she hears a gunshot and then Bucky’s involuntary grunt at the impact of the bullet over the radio that night.  She jerks upright on the bed, her voice high and frightened.  “Bucky?”

She hears a quick  _ pop pop  _ of Bucky returning fire, and his breathing.  “GSW right bicep, minimal damage, not compromised.  Continuing mission.”

“No!  No, Bucky, you’re hurt!”

“Asset is functional,” he says, flat tone clear even over the clatter of noises behind him.

“Bu—” The rattle of gunfire cuts her off.  She whispers, almost to herself: “Please, be careful.  Please.”

The sounds of shouting, screaming, gunshots, and explosions aren’t new or unusual, but they scare Darcy more this time around.  Because Bucky’s there, and bleeding.  What if the gunshot wound to his arm throws off his aim?  What if it slows him down?

There’s a roar of static and formless noise over the radio, an explosion.  She hears Bucky shout and grunt, and waits, heart in her throat, for the chaos to die down enough that the radio isn’t overwhelmed.

“Ankle,” he says through the static, at last.  “Landed wrong on it, something’s broken.”

She goes cold.  “Can you move?  Bucky!  Can you move?”

“Hairline fracture,” he says after a tense moment.  “It’ll hold if wrapped properly.  Not compromised.  Continuing mission.”

“The hell you are!” Darcy yelps.  “Bucky!  Don’t!   _ James Buchanan Barnes _ !”

There’s the sharp report of a handful of gunshots, then he says, voice warmer, more human and less Soldier: “Full name, doll?  ‘M I in trouble?”

“So much trouble,” she says, throat going tight.  “All of the trouble.”

“I’m almost done here,” he says, voice still holding the warmth of Bucky.  “I’m going to finish this up; I’ll be back in a few hours.”

“Okay,” she says, voice small.  She can’t lie back down after that, too keyed up from his injuries.  Listening to the sounds of him clearing the rest of the base and setting his explosives charges, she digs out the medical supplies they’d acquired somewhere between Wisconsin and Nebraska.  She’s been exploring the internet with a single-minded drive over the last couple weeks, trying to absorb as much as she can about everything she can… including emergency first aid.  Bucky had nodded approvingly when he caught her watching a youtube video about when and how to set sutures, and the next time he’d done a supply-run, he’d returned with a new backpack full of… everything she might ever need, really.  Though she’s hoping she won’t ever have to use the rib spreader.

The small tasks of prepping the items she’ll need (tweezers and suture needle needed to be sterilized, but everything else came in single-use sterile packs), and sanitizing the bathroom counter as a workspace, help to calm her enough that her hands aren’t shaking anymore.

It feels like an eternity before Bucky’s unlocking the door and slipping through quietly.  Her heart lurches at the sight of his bloody sleeve, and grimy face.  He limps, slightly, on a tightly wrapped ankle.

“Bucky,” she says, momentarily frozen.

“Looks worse than it is,” he says.  “The ankle is just a hairline fracture, and it already healing.  And the bullet didn’t hit anything vital.  I just need you to dig it out and bandage it.”

“Sutures,” she murmurs as she touches his arm, eyes on the wound, which still bleeds sluggishly.

“Fine,” Bucky agrees after a pause that says he doesn’t think he needs them.  Darcy pulls him to the bathroom, and has him sit on the closed toilet with his shirt off.  The wound pulls with the motion of taking the garment off, and blood trickles a little more heavily down the arm.  Darcy wipes it away, and rinses the bullet hole with saline so she can get a clearer look.

He’s right that it isn’t very bad; she can actually see the bullet, though she still needs to dig a little with the tweezers to get a grip on it.  Pulling it out, she’s surprised—as she always is—by how small bullets really are.  So small for something that can be so lethal.

Bucky sits still and stoic for her as she cleans the wound again and puts in two sutures, to hold it closed while his accelerated healing seals it up.  After she’s smoothed down a gauze bandage with medical tape, Darcy lets the rigid control that’s been keeping her steady and upright to lapse.  She leans forward against him, resting her forehead against his chest, breath abruptly ragged and wet.

“You promised you’d be careful.”

His hands settle on her shoulders.  “I was careful.  Sometimes careful’s not enough, doll-face, you know that.”

“I wish you didn’t have to do this,” she whispers.  There’s a pause, and then Bucky lays his cheek against her hair.

“You know why I do.”

“I do.  I just…”

“Yeah,” Bucky murmurs, pulling her closer against him.  “Yeah.”

* * *

Darcy is clingy that night, needing to ground herself with a brush of her fingers against his skin, reminding herself that he’s there and alive and safe.  After Bucky showers off the grime and blood of his mission, they arrange themselves in their usual spots.  Darcy curled on the bed, Bucky in a chair beside it, their hands clasped in the space between.

She closes her eyes and sings her lullaby to comfort them both, and doesn’t remember when she stops or when she falls asleep.  But when she wakes up the next day, Bucky looks more rested than he has in the last few days.

* * *

Their next destination is Salt Lake City, but Darcy begs for them to stop at the Grand Canyon.  In part because she’s seen photographs on the internet, and want to see such a beautiful place for herself.  And in part because…

“I’ve always wanted to see the Grand Canyon,” Bucky says after a long pause.  Darcy smiles.  She knows.

“It’s on the way,” she says.  “And it’ll be another day or two before your wounds are entirely healed.  We may as well stop and rest.”

Bucky levels a look on her that tells her he knows exactly what she’s doing, but he agrees anyway.  Darcy doesn’t mind that he’s on to her.  He’s letting her delay them, agreeing to the small detour, this break, a rest.  He needs rest—something other than base after base of enemies.

She smiles and settles into the bucket seat of their newest ‘borrowed’ car.  The sound of Journey drifts out of the one functioning speaker, the classic rock station the only one the car’s little radio can pick up out here.  Darcy doesn’t really mind; she loves all of the different music they can find on the radio and online.  Humans are really amazing in what they can create.  She’s not sure whether she loves their music or their stories better.

Her smile broadens a little with the memory of Bucky’s first encounter with music after seventy years.  It hadn’t been right away, maybe three weeks after they’d left DC.  When they leave places, they do so early in the morning, stealing cars before the world wakes up to see them.  It means that what comes on the radio, when the cars start and the sound systems engage, are talk-shows.  Bucky always turns them off immediately, before it gets later in the day, when the music actually starts.  But one day, for whatever reason, he’d turned the radio back on a few hours later, while they’d been driving down a long flat stretch of middle America.  Something loud and mechanical sounding and angry had filled the car, and Bucky had immediately slapped the radio off again, looking appalled.  Darcy had laughed at him.

To be fair, music now is so very different from what they’d played seventy years ago, when he’d last listened to music.  Count Basie and Glenn Miller it is not.  But just because it is different doesn’t mean it is bad, and Darcy finds herself eagerly drinking in every genre.  The upbeat energy of bubblegum pop has her shimmying in her seat; she sings along with rock songs, bobs her head with the heavy beat of dubstep, hums harmonies with bluegrass.

The music had slowly grown on Bucky.  He’d complained about the noise at first, but after Darcy had played ‘In the Mood’ for him on their laptop, triggering a flashback that’d had Bucky shaking and disoriented for almost half an hour, they’d agreed that listening to music that wouldn’t trip any of his memories would be best.  At least while he is driving.

The North Rim of Grand Canyon is relatively close to Las Vegas, provided one is also looking to head toward Salt Lake City.  It only takes them a few hours to reach Toroweap Overlook.  It’s not a common site for tourists wanting a look at the canyon, so they have the area more or less to themselves.

Darcy stands at the edge of the drop-off, jaw a little slack at the view.  It’s absolutely beautiful.  She’s been in some beautiful places before, Shepherding souls from lush forests and proud mountains, but she’d never been as present in them as she can be now.  She can smell the dusty air, feel the heat of the sun on her skin.  Wind rushes up against her from the canyon.  She leans into it, feeling it press back against her.  If feels familiar, welcoming.

She closes her eyes against the dizzying onslaught of sense-memory.  Her wings shift and flex under her shirt, and—

Bucky’s hands grip her hard, yanking her backwards.  They both fall to the gritty dirt, Darcy’s eyes flying open as she yelps.  He doesn’t let go, hauling her against him.

“What the  _ hell _ , doll!” he shouts.  “You tryin’ to kill yourself?”

“What?” She puts a hand to her head, mind buzzing.

“You almost just pitched yourself off the edge!”

“I… I think I can fly…”

“Jesus H. Christ, Darcy, so what, you decided to test the theory by jumping into the Grand Canyon?” he snaps, arms tight around her.

“I’m… The wind… I just…” Darcy can’t quite think straight yet, still a little lost in strange-familiar sensation of her wings spreading wide and the wind catching them.  She blinks stupidly at Bucky, whose furious expression eases a little when he sees her dazed expression.  “I remember flying, Bucky.”

He huffs and tucks her under his chin again.  “Goddamn, doll-face.  That’s great, but just…  _ Jesus _ .”

She lets him hold her, feeling his heartbeat against her cheek—fast, but settling down—and just breaths for a few minutes.  She shifts and rubs her nose against the curve of his arm in front of her face.  “I’m sorry for scaring you.”

He gives a rusty laugh.  “‘S fine, just… just no more throwing yourself off three-thousand foot cliffs, okay?  Think there are better ways to test your wings.”

“You mean I can?” Darcy asks, pulling back enough that she can look at him in excited surprise.  They’ve been keeping a low profile, aside from the ruin of bases and dead HYDRA agents they’ve been leaving in their wake.  And her wings aren’t very low-profile.

“We’ll figure somethin’ out,” Bucky promises.  “Those wings’re a part of you.  And being able to fly might help you if we ever run into trouble.”

“I want to try,” she says with determination.

“Yeah,” he says, and his eyes slide beyond her to the drop-off and the wide vista of the Grand Canyon.  “Just, you know, we’ll start with somethin’ small, huh?”

Darcy laughs and wraps her arms around him.

* * *

The thing is, they don’t get the chance to figure something out.

Salt Lake City’s target isn’t a HYDRA base.  Rather, the mission is assassination.  One of HYDRA’s higher echelon lives just outside the city, someone whose name Bucky knows from the orders he’d received as the Winter Soldier.  One of the people who’d been pulling his strings.

The assassination isn’t the problem.  The problem is what comes after.

The woman is dead, and Darcy and Bucky are on their way out of the city when Bucky’s grip on the steering wheel tightens and he begins to dart glances at the rear-view mirror.  Darcy notices his tense demeanor instantly.

“What’s wrong?” she asks, craning her head to look back, too.

“We’re being followed,” Bucky answers grimly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whoops. No rest for the wicked, I guess.


	10. Chapter 10

“HYDRA?” Darcy asks in a whisper.  Bucky slips their car around a semi, eyes sharp as the black SUV behind them accelerates to follow.  They’re not being subtle, which either means they’re incompetent, or they’re confident that being spotted won’t change the outcome of this chase.

It’s probably safer to assume the latter.

“Dunno,” Bucky mutters, playing a little fast and loose with the traffic laws.

“I didn’t think they actually use black SUVs,” she says, watching them weave between cars to keep up.  “Secret agents do on TV, but… Isn’t it kind of... obvious?”

“They’re not trying to be stealthy,” Bucky says, and swerves at the last second to take an exit ramp.  The car behind them leans on its horn as they zip in front of it.  He runs the red light at the bottom of the ramp, barely missing getting broad-sided by a produce truck.  They swing onto the cross road and then take a couple quick turns.

“Do they have a helicopter?” Darcy asks, craning her head to look up through her window.

“No, now get your head down.”  Bucky flattens his hand against her back, between her shoulder blades, and presses her forward so she’s folded over her knees.

“What if it’s Steve?” she asks, voice muffled.

There’s a loud  _ pock! pock! pock!  _ of bullets punching holes in the metal frame of the car, and Darcy screams as the window above her shatters.  The tires squeal as Bucky takes a corner fast and sharp.

“Don’t think it’s Steve,” he says, and pulls a gun out from under his seat.  Darcy presses her face closer to her knees and covers her head with her arms.  Her wings rise a little off her back, straining against her shirt, but she holds back a full manifestation by the skin of her teeth.

Bucky yanks the steering wheel around, sending their car into a skidding turn that carries them under an overpass and between two support pillars.  He throws the car into park and lifts the gun with one hand, laying the other across the back of her neck to keep her in place.  He peers out the window with the Soldier’s cool focus.

Helicopters, trackers, and satellites can be used to keep an eye on fleeing targets, making it more likely pursuers will catch their quarry.  With the care Bucky takes, trackers are extremely unlikely, and he says they don’t have a helicopter.  A spy satellite could provide a real-time video of the chase for as long as the satellite is over the location on the globe.  How quickly do satellites get out of range?  Could HYDRA (she suspects that’s who is following them, based on the shooting), even commandeer a satellite at this point?  She would have thought they’d still be reeling after DC.  Maybe they don’t have a satellite, and Bucky’ll be able to lose them with a bit of sharp driving.

They wait in tense silence to see if he’s managed it.  Her head tucked between her knees, Darcy can only strain her ears for any indication that the SUV had been able to follow them.  She can hear the traffic of the interstate above them, and the more sedate traffic of the streets around them.

A large-sounding car pulls under the overpass with them, and Bucky fires his gun, emptying the clip into what is presumably the black SUV.  The sound of the report is ear-drum-shattering in the small space of the car, and it echoes loudly against the concrete around them, too.  Darcy grits her teeth and presses her hands against her ears.  She lurches and hits her head against the door handle as Bucky puts the car into drive and peels out of there like a formula-one racer.  Bullets rattle against their car.

With her head down, Darcy isn’t sure what’s happening.  Mostly she’s aware of the pull of motion and gravity as the car whips around turns, dodges other cars, and goes over bumps like it might take flight.  Her head rattles with the sound of gunfire (so much louder in person; she’s forgotten how loud).

“I can’t lose them,” Bucky says, Soldier-flat.  “We need to abandon the car and gain defensive ground.”

“What?” Darcy yelps, her head jerking up involuntarily in surprise.  “They’ll shoot us the second we open the doors!”

“Only if they catch up to us in time,” he says, and floors it.  Darcy’s thrown back against her seat as they skid around a couple corners, trying to put enough distance between their car and the SUV to give them a chance to bail.  “Grab the bags.”

The duffle’s in the backseat, the backpack at Darcy’s feet.  She grabs both, putting them on her lap and hunching a little over them.  The wind whipping through the broken window beside her howls through her hair, tangling up all around her.  It flies into her face, but she can still see when the traffic-light in front of them turns red and Bucky runs it, earning them a chorus of carhorns.  But it slows down the trailing SUV.  Bucky zips down a side street and turns into an alley.

“Out,” he says, suiting action to words and popping out of the still-running car faster than Darcy can think.  She scrambles after him, clutching their bags to her chest.  Bucky beckons her over to where he stands under a fire escape.  Once she gets close enough, he grabs the duffle from her and loops an arm through the handles to swing it over his shoulder.  Taking the backpack, he helps her put it on, and buckles it across her chest so it won’t bounce around.  Once that’s done, he boosts her up to grab the fire escape ladder.  “Climb.”

She does, as quickly as she can—the metal structure shakes under her feet and makes a terrible racket.  Bucky jumps up after her, the metal shrieking at the added weight.  Once on the roof, Bucky takes her hand and hustles them to the far edge.  A glance down reveals another roof maybe half a story lower, and Bucky’s grip tightens on her.  “We’re going to jump, okay?”

“Okay,” she says, squeezing his hand back.  It’s not too far of a jump, enough to shock joints but not to break anything, and Darcy doesn’t hesitate when Bucky moves them forward.  The gravel of the rooftop crunches under their shoes as they land and immediately run to the next roof, this one a simple stepping over of edges.  They’re halfway across this one when shots kick up ‘V’s of grit around them.  Bucky throws both of them to the side, behind a large air-intake vent, and begins to return fire.

Darcy curls up tight into herself, trying to make as small a target as possible as a couple bullets punch through the weaker aluminum alloy that composed the very top of the vent, above their heads.  She notices movement on an adjacent rooftop, and shouts a warning: “Bucky! Seven o’clock!”

He snaps off two more shots, then twists, sighting perfectly the trio of black-garbed men trying to flank them.  Even with just a pistol, he snipes them with perfect headshots.

It’s not until the Shepherds appear beside their bodies that Darcy realizes that she hasn’t seen Bucky kill someone since that day in DC.  She’d been too distracted then to notice whether any of her brethren had appeared to reap those souls, but now she’s staring right at the bodies and can’t miss them.  Three Shepherds, three creatures like her.  She hasn’t seen any since… since she’d been bound to Bucky.  All the humans that had died around her from that point on,  _ she _ had Shepherded.  There hadn’t been another like her nearby, because there hadn’t needed to be.  But she doesn’t, or can’t, Shepherd souls anymore, not since Pierce and the energy gun.

She gapes at the Shepherds, shocked.  The brief glimmer of the souls’ light dance along the curve of their wings.

“Wait!” she gasps, snapping out of her surprise.  “Don’t go!”

She doesn’t realize she’s standing until Bucky tackles her.

He drags her back under cover, keeping a hand firmly on her back to keep her low.  She twists, but the Shepherds are gone already, their jobs done.  Darcy feels their absence like a vice around her heart.  The first Shepherds she sees in seven decades, and they’re gone in a blink.

“No!” she breaths out in something close to a sob.  Bucky grips the back of her shirt, using it to lift her to her feet and drive her forward.

“Move!” he grates out, and looking at him, Darcy can see that he’s fully the Soldier.  She moves, though a part of her screams out against leaving the dead behind—the dead to whom Shepherds might appear, affording Darcy an opportunity to finally speak with one of her brethren, ask them the questions she can’t answer.

Bucky hustles them down a fire escape, down into an alley and then out onto the pedestrian street at its mouth.  It’s around noon, and the area is fairly busy with business-people out on their lunch breaks.  They might be able to slip into the crowd and be lost.

They’re halfway down the street when the shopfront beside them explodes.

* * *

Darcy comes to slowly, to pain and a strange high ringing in her ears.  It takes effort to open her eyes, and when she does, they immediately sting from the smoke tainting the air.  She blinks, and tries to move, and bites back a scream.

Her shoulder is dislocated, her body covered in scattered bruises and gashes—from the chips of concrete and brick, and slivers of glass that had been thrown out from the blast.  Her wings flutter against her back; she must have manifested them involuntarily, some unthinking attempt to flee or hide from the explosion.

There’s ash in the feathers, turning the sleek black quills grey.  They shiver on her back, the left one drooping, muscles and bone misaligned due to her shoulder.  It burns like fire under her skin to shift them back enough for her to see what’s going on around her.  She doesn’t care.

The street is almost clear of civilians, except for those who are injured and can’t move, and the few brave who have stayed to try to help them.  They, and Darcy, watch in fear and shock as a dozen black-garbed, Kevlar-kitted, and gun-toting soldiers engage in a combination firefight and fisticuffs with a single blue-hoodied brunet man.

_ Bucky.  Bucky.  Bucky. _

She has to get up.  Has to help, has to fight.

She staggers upright painfully, drunkenly.  She can hear her breath, strangely loud inside her head, but nothing else beyond the ringing.  The explosion must have temporarily deafened her.  She doesn’t care.

It’s hard to walk, every part of her bruised, missing a shoe and her ankle swollen.  But she drags herself forward step by painful step.  The tattered remains of her shirt and bra flop uselessly against her chest, tacky with blood, but she doesn’t want to wait time trying to wrestle them off her immobile arm.  The backpack that had been on her shoulders is nowhere to be found, but there’s a welt across her chest where the front band had been, already deepening into a bruise.  She doesn’t care.

She struggles closer to Bucky.  If she can just get close enough, she can help.  If she can just touch them…

They know what she can do, after the bank vault, and she is moving slowly.  But because they are HYDRA, they don’t kill her, not when they might be able to use her.  The net is heavy and huge, and it drops down on her, yanking her wings down and wrenching her shoulder.  It drags her to her knees.  She screams, she knows she does even if she can’t hear herself.

Bucky can hear her, because Bucky’s head snaps around, attention shifting from his opponents to her.  He starts to move for her, but he’s still surrounded and now he’s on the defensive, falling back.

Darcy thrashes under the net, wings straining against the constraints, fingers ripping at the heavy, smooth weave, uncaring of how much it hurts.  She thinks she’s still screaming, but she’s not sure, all of her attention on Bucky and how he staggers back from an attacker’s hard kick.

The HYDRA agent—or agents—responsible for the net haul on it, sending Darcy crashing flat to the pavement.  Something pops in her back, and tears, and she feels wetness down the back of her shoulder.  She shrieks, vision whiting out and all the strength leaving her body.

Panting into the debris-covered ground, she’s barely aware of the hard wind that kicks up and the sudden slacking of the net.  There’s another explosion that rumbles through the ground under her cheek.  She watches with fading sight as Bucky goes down and the HYDRA soldiers converge on him, only to scatter abruptly when a streak of gleaming metal slices through them.  

Her lips part and her fingers twitch, wanting to lift and reach, because she recognizes that bright gleam.  But she’s too weak, too injured.  She passes out between one breath and the next.

* * *

The room is still and quiet, the only sound the faint hush of air through the vents.  Darcy wakes with her cheek pressed against a thin mattress that smells of soap and dust.  She blinks slowly, trying to clear the cobwebs of pain from her head.

Everything is bland beige, from the walls to the sheets on the little cot.  There is no other furniture besides the bed, no windows, a single metal door, and a large mirror.

No, wait.  She’s seen enough TV to know that that is not a mirror, it’s a one-way window.  She’s in an observation room.

That wakes her faster, and she tentatively tries to move.  There’s no pain, so at least whoever has her had put her shoulder back into its socket and tended to her wounds.  She’s not sure how long she’s been out, but if she has to guess from the vague shadow of healing bruises on her arms, it’s only been a day or so.

Her wings are half-extended, cradled in fabric loops suspended from the ceiling, keeping their weight from dragging down on her shoulder as it heals.  She doesn’t really want them to know all of her abilities, so she only extracts them from the slings, leaving them manifested.

Her dirty, torn clothes are gone, a thin fabric hospital gown in their place.  It’s mostly open at the back for her wings.  However, the room is a decent temperature, not too cold, so Darcy doesn’t mind much.  Darcy slowly shifts on the bed, arranging her wings behind her as she sits at the edge and prods carefully at her shoulder.  It can move now, though there’s a line of stitches down the back of it that pull at the skin when she rotates the joint.

Darcy jumps when someone knocks briskly on the door before opening it.  She considers standing, but they might take that as aggression.  She clenches her fingers on the edge of the bed, instead.

A red-haired woman steps inside calmly, and Darcy blinks at her, eyes narrowing.  She seems familiar, somehow.  She watches Darcy as Darcy watches her, walking a few paces closer but remaining just out of easy reach.  Something in the way she moves clicks in Darcy’s mind.

It’s the woman from years ago, the bodyguard the Soldier had shot through to get his target, the scientist.  Darcy licks her lips, nervous.  Did that make her an enemy?  But, if she’d been an enemy of HYDRA then, maybe she is an ally now?

“Are you in any pain?” she asks, mildly, bearing with Darcy’s wide-eyed stare.

“W-where—” she swallows thickly “—where am I?”

“A SHIELD holding-cell.”

Darcy goes cold, eyes going wider.  SHIELD is gone.  SHIELD was HYDRA.  Were they...? Her voice small, terrified.  “Where’s Bucky?”

“Bucky?” asks the woman.

“The—the man… The man who was fighting,” Darcy can feel her head start to spin.  “Where is he?”

“The Asset… the Winter Soldier,” the woman says, watching with interest as Darcy’s wings begin to rustle.  “We have him.”

The _Soldier_ , the _Asset_ , she says.   _ No.  No no no no no. _  This can’t be happening.  They can’t have been captured again.  She can’t… She won’t let it be true.

“Where’s Bucky?  Where’s Bucky?” Darcy’s voice rises to fill the room and press against its walls.  Her wings unfold with a snap, and beat the air into a tumult.  “IF YOU’VE HURT HIM—!”

The woman is fast.  Very fast; as fast as Bucky.  She’s out of the room and gone in a flash, and Darcy hits the door a split second after it snaps shut.  She pounds on the metal with her fists, wings smacking against door and walls.

“WHERE’S BUCKY?   _ DON’T YOU HURT HIM _ !  DON’T YOU EVEN THINK ABOUT HURTING HIM!  BUCKY!” She sobs, and screams.  “ _ BUCKY!” _

She catches sight of herself—wild and raw with loose feathers in her unkempt hair, eyes wide and red-rimmed—in the one-way mirror and wrenches herself away to the far corner of the room.  She draws her wings around her and weeps into their cool, smooth feathers.

She’d thought they’d escaped.  She’d thought she’d seen the shield,  _ his  _ shield.  She’d thought that maybe they’d be okay.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nat's not really gentle when it comes to intelligence gathering.


	11. Chapter 11

When the door opens again, Darcy flinches violently, knocking her shoulders back against the wall behind her.  Her wings tighten around her and she makes an involuntary noise, small and frightened.  It’s going to happen now.  They’ll hurt Bucky, or they’ll hurt her to hurt him.  They’ll be punished for running away.  For killing so many HYDRA agents.

“Darcy?”

She gasps, wings parting, and through her still slightly-watery eyes, she sees Captain America.  Steve Rogers.  “Stevie?”

He blinks, confusion on his face, probably from her apparent familiarity with him, but doesn’t let it distract from his purpose.  “Your name is Darcy, isn’t it?”

“Y-yes,” she sniffles.  “Y-you’re here.  How are you here?  Are—are you a prisoner, too?”

But if he were, wouldn’t he not be able to just walk in here like he did?  Steve’s brow furrows further, and he stares at her for a long moment as she wipes ineffectually at her tears.  “Who are you?  How do you know Bucky?”

“I’m… I’ve… I’ve always known Bucky,” she falters.  “I don’t… It’s hard to explain…”

“Try.”  Steve’s voice is the sharp, firm one she remembers him using on captured Wehrmacht and HYDRA soldiers.  It hurts, even though she knows he’s never met her, doesn’t know her like she knows him.  She nods, licking her lips and tasting the salt of her tears on them.  It should be okay to tell him, right?  Even if HYDRA is listening in, they already know what she is—or at least, they know that she doesn’t know what she is.

“I’m… I’m not supposed to be here.   _In_ the world.  I’m supposed to be at the edge of it, where only the dying can see me.”  She twists her fingers together, searching for the words to explain.  “I-I don’t know what I am.  I’ve been called a lot of things.  Angel.  Reaper.  Valkyrie.  Shinigami.  I don’t know whether they’re right and that’s what I am.  I’ve always called myself a Shepherd.”

“Valkyrie.  Does that mean you’re from Asgard?”

Darcy frowns.  “They asked me that before.  What’s Asgard?”

Steve drums his fingers against his bicep once, watching her with piercing blue eyes, before he responds.  “Asgard is a place.  And alien realm.”

She furrows her brow thoughtfully.  “I don’t… I don’t think I’m from there.  But I… don’t really know where I’m from, or what I really am.  I just… I just woke up one day, and all I knew what how to do my job.  I named myself Darcy.”

“And what _is_ your job?”

“I Shepherd souls.  Or, um, I used to.  I can’t anymore, after coming _into_ the world.  But I used to appear to the dying, and their souls would…” she struggles with the explanation.  “It’s like… it’s like there was a door, within me, that would open for them.  And then they’d go through it.”

“Are you going to… ‘Shepherd’ Bucky?” Steve asks tightly.  Darcy meets his gaze in shock.

“No!  No,” Darcy blurts, heart lurching at the thought.

“You told HYDRA you were waiting for him to die.”

Her mouth works a moment before she bursts: “ _Of course_ I told them that.  What was I going to do?  Tell them the truth?”

“And what _is_ the truth?”

Darcy stares at him, meets his direct, blue gaze.  She breathes.  “I’ve been with him for seven decades.  I’ve been with him since he fell from the train in the Alps, since he lay dying in the snow at the bottom of that ravine.  I was with him for every second they cut him open, tore him apart, hurt him in the name of saving his life.  I carried his memories for him when they burned them out of his mind, until I could give him back his name.  Until I could give him back _yours_ .  I have been with him for every second of those moments, and I will _always_ be with him, to the end of the line.”

Her voice is creaking with the strain of the emotions it carries at the end there, and there’s a knot in her throat that threatens to choke her.  Steve stares, his expression a lot more open and softer.  They stare at each other, and then Steve slowly lowers himself to the floor, sitting with his legs crossed, and reaches up and pulls a little bud speaker out of his ear, placing it deliberately on the floor next to him.

Someone behind the one-way mirror smacks a hand against it in annoyance at him.  Darcy jumps, looking at it, but nobody charges into the room; they are seemingly content for now to curse Steve roundly from behind the reflective glass.  Darcy looks back at him.

“That’s why you called me ‘Stevie’,” he says.  His voice, like his expression, is softer.  Unguarded.   _This_ is Steve.  Bucky’s Steve.  Darcy’s Steve.

“Yes.”  She matches the quiet tone.  “I learned you through Bucky’s eyes.”

“Tell me everything,” Steve says.  So Darcy does.

* * *

When she’s finally finished talking, throat scratchy and voice hoarse, Steve’s shifted to sit with his back against the wall, knees bent in front of him.  His head hangs low over them.  Darcy tries to work moisture back into her mouth as she waits for his reaction.  Finally, he lifts his head and meet her eyes with his own red-rimmed ones.

“Thank you,” he says, “for being there with him through everything.”

Darcy swallows and blinks back sudden tears.  “But I was never able to help him.  All I could ever do was watch while they hurt him.”

Steve shakes his head.  “You were still a kind presence with him throughout that.  Don’t discount how much that matters.”

Now the tears cannot be denied, and Darcy sniffles.  Steve waits a moment for her to collect herself, then tells her: “I apologize for my friend, from before.  Nat wanted to sound you out a little before we told you anything.  We’d found the video footage of Pierce’s interrogation of you, and we weren’t sure what your play was.”

“Your friend… the red-haired woman?”

“Yes, that’s her.  I’m sorry she upset you, but it told her what she wanted to know,” he says, with a shrug.  He looks sincere, but she’s sure he’s not very upset with his friend.  During the war, he’d understood necessity and intimidation tactics.  Darcy, in turn, has already forgiven them.  It’s _Steve_ , and Steve will help Bucky.

“She—she said,” Darcy hesitates.  “She said you have Bucky here?”

His expression changes a little, sadder and more worried.  “Yes.  He… HYDRA triggered him, when they saw that we were there and they might lose him.  They said some words, and he just started… We managed to subdue him, but he’s still attacking anyone who enters his cell.  We don’t know how to deprogram him.”

“I do,” Darcy whispers.  “I know how.  Please, I can help.  I was there when they programmed him.  I know all the triggers and the codes.”

* * *

Darcy waits in her cell for Steve and his allies to decide what to do with her, and with Bucky.  Steve had brought in a man Darcy had recognized from the news reports, the flier.  He’d introduced himself as Sam Wilson, and had admitted to being the one who’d stitched her up.  He’d been surprised she’d healed enough that they’d needed to come out already.  He’d removed the stitches, mumbling all the while about ‘healing factors’ and being ‘surrounded by super-humans’ and how he was ‘gonna develop a complex.’  She’d thanked him sincerely, because he’d been gentle and there’d been a current of good-humor in his grumbling, and he’d smiled at her.

Still, they seem to be having quite a discussion over whether to let her have contact with Bucky (though with some of what they’re saying, she doesn’t think they know she can hear them through the walls).  Steve is, understandably, insistent that she help immediately.  Sam is of the opinion that they should wait for Nat to return with someone called Thor.  When Steve relents and says “You’re probably right.” Sam thinks he’s won, but Darcy knows better.  She’s seen as much of Steve as Bucky has, and knows the man behind the figure of Captain America.

Sure enough, approximately a day after ‘agreeing’ with Sam, Steve shows up at her cell.  He gives her a lopsided grin when he enters, expression reminding her strongly of the scrappy Brooklyn boy of Bucky’s memories.

“Are we going to see Bucky now?” Darcy asks, and Steve’s grin becomes a smile.

“Yes, if that’s okay with you?”  He offers a hand to help her to her feet, and she takes it, wings rustling with excitement.  They’d given her clothes, jeans and something called a halter-top, which covers her front but leaves her back uncovered for her wings.  She wears them tucked against her back now, not fully manifested but more present than the necklace-form she’d held them in for the last several weeks.  With the less restrictive halter-top, she’s noticed they are more responsive to her emotions, shifting and moving more readily.  They are shivering against her now as her heart flutters.

They go perfectly still when she and Steve step outside and come face-to-face with a disapproving redheaded woman.  Steve startles visibly in surprise, but she just stares at them with her arms crossed over her chest, one eyebrow lifted.  “I could have told Wilson you’d do this.”

“Come on, Nat,” Steve says, recovering quickly.  “You know as well as I do that this’ll work just fine.  She loves him.”

Darcy feels as if her breath has been punched from her.  She is vaguely aware of Steve and Nat speaking—something about traveling, and Thor—but mostly she is aware of the throbbing of her heart in her ears, like she’s underwater.

“Love?” she says, voice weirdly muffled in her own ears.  “Is this what love is?”

They break off and stare at her.  Nat’s expression is smooth and subtle, her eyes assessing.  Steve’s face gentles, the slight frown easing off his lips.  She stares back at him, trembling minutely.  “I… I love him?”

“Yeah,” he says softly.  “Yeah, I think you do.”

“Oh,” Darcy breathes.  “Oh.  I’ve never… I’ve never felt love before.”

She pauses, and rubs the heel of her hand against her sternum, eyebrows drawing together.  “It hurts.  I didn’t know it could hurt.”

Steve’s expression does something complicated then, and Darcy can’t read it.  He seems unable to find anything to say.  Nat takes it upon herself to break the tense silence.

“Fine, Rogers,” she says, calling his attention back to her.  “But you’re responsible for her.”

“You’re letting us…?”  he starts, and cuts off with a twitch of her brow.

“You’re right.  She loves him,” the redhead tells him, then looks at Darcy.  “Be careful, little bird.  He might not be the man you knew.”

“He’s never hurt me before,” she says.  “Not once after all the times they wiped him.  He always remembered me.”

“Hm,” says Nat.

“I’ll take care of it,” Steve promises, and gently takes Darcy’s hand to lead her to Bucky’s cell.

* * *

Darcy’s heart breaks a little when she watches the Soldier prowl around his cell like a caged tiger, all dangerous grace.  He’s fully the Soldier; there’s no Bucky in the way he moves and assesses the room with cold, sharp eyes.  Steve stands next to her at the one-way mirror, jaw tight as he watches.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” he asks.  Darcy doesn’t look away from Bucky.

“He’s not going to hurt me,” she says.  “They never were able to take me away from him.  It’s different than what they did with you; his memories of you were so ingrained with his past, with who he was, they had to burn you out of him even though they thought you were dead.  They had to make sure he didn’t remember _you_ , specifically, or he broke from the programming more quickly.”

In her peripheral vision, Steve nods slowly.  “I’m still going to go in with you.  Just in case.”

At this, Darcy turns to face him.  “No.  Well, not right away.  Let me go in first, let him see me and recognize me before you do.”

He frowns and considers this before agreeing reluctantly.  Darcy takes a breath.  “Do you know what they said to trigger him?  If I know which words they used, I’ll have a better idea of how to defuse him.”

“It was Russian,” Steve sighs.  She nods; most of them were, a product of the decades Bucky had been in the Soviets’ toolbox.  “Dyadya Yuri poseshchayet.”

He says it slowly, from memory.  His accent is very good, Darcy thinks.  He sounds like the Soviet scientists who had programmed the words into Bucky’s subconscious.  It’s probably a result of his serum-enhanced hearing and memory—perfect mimicry.

“Uncle Yuri is visiting,” Darcy translates.  “It’s a total war protocol; the trigger overrides any mission objectives he’s been given, and tells him to attack anything and everyone that could be a threat.”

“So then he _could_ attack you,” Steve says, but Darcy shakes her head.

“I don’t register as a threat to him; I’m familiar, I’m an ally.”  She touches his hand reassuringly.  “It’ll be okay, Steve.  I promise.”

He frowns, and seems to struggle with himself, but eventually keys in the code to unlock the door.

Darcy gives him a nod, then enters the cell to find Bucky on the other side of the room, poised to pounce on anyone who came through the door.  He’d positioned himself perfectly so that he’d have a clean avenue of attack, while the sightline of anyone coming in would be fouled by the door.  He freezes, though, when he sees it’s her.

Darcy takes a few steps closer and, very gently, says: “Sputnik.”

Bucky collapses, loose-limbed in a way that makes Darcy go cold a little with how it reminds her of the way bodies fall when they’ve been killed instantly.  But there’s no gory hole from a head- or heart-shot.  He’s just unconscious.

“ _Jesus_!” Steve exclaims, darting forward too late to catch him.  Darcy kneels with him beside Bucky’s limp form.  He gives her a reproving look.  “A little warning would have been nice.”

“Sorry,” she says, stroking the hair back from Bucky’s face.  “He’s just asleep.  I used a good-night trigger; they meant for it to be used when they needed to subdue him quickly.  He’ll wake up in twenty-four hours.”

“He’s just sleeping?”  Steve touches Bucky’s face with a hand that trembles.

“Yes.  And he’ll wake up clean of the previous trigger; this one is a little bit like a reset button.”

Steve hauls up Bucky’s limp, unconscious form and lays him down on the bare cot in the corner.  He barely struggles under the weight of his serum-muscled body and the metal arm.  “He’s not going to attack us, then, when he wakes up?”

“As long as he recognizes the person as not HYDRA, he probably won’t attack.  He was remembering you, you know.  Before all this.  It was what broke him from their programming at the start.  He recognized you when you fought, on the bridge.  He came back and asked who you were… Pierce wasn’t happy.”

“He remembers me?”  Steve looks weary and sad and hopeful all at the same time.

“Yes.  Did you find a backpack with me, in Utah?  He had notebooks in it, where he’d write his memories.”

“No,” Steve says, regretful.  “We saw the backpack, but it was in pieces.  And, um, on fire.”

“Oh.” Darcy hadn’t expected it to be okay, but it still saddens her for Bucky’s sake.  She knows he’s afraid of forgetting again, and having the written memories had eased some of that fear.  She strokes his hair, looking down at his slack face.  After a moment, Steve shifts and clears his throat reluctantly.

“Natasha brought Thor back with her; we think he might be able to help answer some of the questions you have about… well, about what you are.”

“Do we need to leave?” Darcy asks, looking down at Bucky.

“It might be for the best,” Steve says.  “But we can come back later, if you want.”

Darcy smooths back Bucky’s hair once more.  “Okay.”

* * *

Thor is a very tall, very muscular man with wheat-gold hair and a trailing cloak of the most vivid crimson she has ever seen.  He bows when he sees her, saying: “Well-met, Lady.”

She blinks.  “Um.  Hello.”

As an afterthought, she dips an awkward curtsy.  Thor smiles at her and turns to Steve, clasping hands with him.  “Friend Steve, I am glad to see you again.  And I hear you have recovered your shield-brother at last.  This is joyful news indeed.”

“Thanks, Thor,” Steve says with a weary smile.  Thor steps to the side and they see for the first time that he’s not alone.  A woman stands behind him, blonde hair pulled back into an elegant twist.  Like Thor’s clothes, her seafoam green gown and bronze half-armor are super-saturated color.  She steps forward with a mild smile, bearing regal.

“May I introduce my mother, the Lady Frigga, Queen of Asgard.”

If Thor’s declaration surprises him at all, Steve doesn’t show it.  He nods his head very solemnly to her.  “Ma’am.”

Darcy echoes him, and curtsies again, with a little less wobble this time.  The Queen smiles at her, an echo of her son’s expression in her features.  “I am glad to meet you, Cousin.”

Darcy finds herself at a loss for words.  “I… Do you know me, Your Majesty?”

“After a fashion,” Frigga says easily.  “Thor asked me here for your sake; I understand that there is some confusion as to your nature?”

“I… Yes, I…” She gives up as her tongue ties itself into knots.

“We thought she might be a valkyrie, Ma’am,” Steve says, when it becomes apparent that she’s lost her voice.  “She’s been called one often enough, and her… job… fits.”

“No, not a valkyrie,” Frigga says absently, lifting Darcy face with a gentle touch under her chin.  “She is not Asgardian, and so cannot be a valkyrie, no matter what your legends say.  Valkyries are of Asgard, and can only collect the souls of Asgardians.  Your Midgard does, however, have its own collectors, as every world does.  Your ancient Norsemen, with whom Asgard had contact, borrowed the title of valkyrie to describe Midgard’s collectors.  I believe there are also other terms, from other lands?  The one I am most familiar with is the Morrígan; my people had some contact with the Celts.”

Darcy’s wings shiver.

“The Battle Crow,” she whispers.  “The woman who guards death.  Yes.  I… I remember.”

“You _remember_ ?” Steve asks, gaping.  “You’re a _goddess_?”

Darcy looks at him, surprised for a moment before remembering that his family had been Irish, his mother an immigrant, and that though they’d been devoutly Catholic, they also remembered the stories of their homeland.

“No,” she says.  “No more a goddess than Thor is a god.  We inspired the legends, but we aren’t the legends.  I’m not the Morrígan, though the stories came about because of me.”

“You specifically?” Steve asks, still looking stunned.

“Yes.  There was a man, a warrior.  Cú Chulainn.  He saved an Asgardian’s life, and she repaid him by warning him of his death.  She told him that a dark-winged woman would come for his soul after he was betrayed by his foster-son.  The stories of Cú Chulainn and the Morrígan grew from that, but they are all just the dreamings of bards.  The first and only time Cú Chulainn and I interacted was when I Shepherded his soul at his death.”

“Shepherd,” Frigga repeats thoughtfully.  “That is lovely.  What a gentle way to speak of it.”

“I’ve always wanted to be kind in what I do,” Darcy admits.  Frigga smiles at her.

“Yes, I can see that.  Though you have been twisted from your purpose, haven’t you?” The Asgardian touches Darcy’s cheek.  “You have the taint of the Tesseract on you.”

“I can’t Shepherd souls anymore,” Darcy agrees, brow furrowing.  “Not since Alexander Pierce shot me with the blue energy weapon.”

“Those are powered by the Tesseract,” Steve tells them.  “HYDRA made those weapons when they had the Tesseract during the war.  Um.  World War II.  But usually when someone is shot with it, they’re vaporized.  Killed instantly.”

“Killed?” Thor says.  “No, I should think not.  The Cosmic Cube does not kill; it is the power of Space.”

“I saw men get shot,” Steve says, brow furrowing.  “They’d vanish, just like that.  It didn’t even leave any remains.”

“It wouldn’t,” Frigga says.  “The Tesseract is not a power for death, it is a power for portals.  Ways between worlds, across space.  The weapons would not have vaporized those men, Captain, it would have transported them elsewhere.”

Steve goes pale.  “Do you mean to tell me those men… They were all still alive?”

“Not necessarily,” Frigga admits regretfully.  “Without control, it is very unlikely the portals led to anywhere but open space, where those men would have died very quickly in the vacuum.”

Her tone is gentle, but Steve still goes grey, his face a mask of horror.  Thor, standing beside him, clasps his shoulder with a sorrowful, concerned look.

“But why didn’t that happen to me?” Darcy asks.  “When Pierce shot me, all it did was bring me into this world, let me be seen and touched by the living.”

“As a… Shepherd?... you straddled this world, and that of the dead.  It is not surprising that the energy of the Tesseract would transport you fully into one or the other.”

Darcy goes cold at the implication that she could have easily been sent away from Bucky, to the after-world.  That she wouldn’t have seen him until he died, if he ever was allowed to.  What kind of pain would HYDRA have put him through if she hadn’t been there when she was?

“I would also expect that the energy of the Tesseract to be the reason you cannot Shepherd souls.  It was as a doorway, held within you, was it not?  When the souls passed from this world to the next?”  Darcy pulls herself back to the conversation at Frigga’s question, and nods.  “I expect the Tesseract closed that Way.  You are not a Shepherd any longer, though you are not quite human, either.”

“It’s… I… tore a soul from the body of a HYDRA agent,” Darcy says, mouth dry at the memory.  “And nothing happened.  The soul just… shattered.  In my hand.  It felt… _wrong_.”

“Oh, Cousin,” Frigga says sadly, cupping Darcy’s face.  “To take a life is a heavy thing.  One such as you should never have had to take the burden.  You aren’t meant to be death, only the guide of the dead.”

Darcy sniffles a little, blinking back tears, and Frigga gives her a moment to collect herself.  After a while, rubbing at the bit of moisture at the corners of her eyes, Darcy asks: “Why do you call me cousin?”

“The Valkyries of Asgard are my sisters, chosen for their task, as you were created for yours.  They consider all collectors, Shepherds, to be their cousins, and so do I, through them.”

“Oh.”

“There may be a way of making you a Shepherd once more,” Frigga says.  “I and my sisters are skilled in the practice of _seidr_.  What you might call magic.  We may be able to re-establish the Way that the Tesseract shut within you.”

“No,” Darcy bites her lip.  “No.  I…. I don’t want to have to leave.”

Frigga cocks her head, looks at her a little more closely.  Then she smiles.  “Ah, you are in love.”

Darcy’s face flames.  Is it that obvious to everyone?  Is she a fool for not having realized that’s what it is, that’s what she’s been feeling?  She opens her mouth to respond, but Frigga frowns suddenly and tilts Darcy’s face a little higher toward her.

“How curious,” she says.  “You carry memories not your own.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope the explanation for what Darcy is makes sense. Marvel takes some liberties with Norse myth with Thor and Loki, etc, so I figured why not do the same with some other myths? Darcy as the Celtic goddess of death and/or war was a compelling image in my head, though the stories of the Morrigan aren't usually happy or pleasant ones. But like I said, liberties were taken. And I find it interesting that in most cultures there's some sort of creature or person who leads dead souls into the next world/death, so I thought, what if there were a basis for that, and any differences were just a matter of different cultural influences on the stories told in a society? So there are Shepherds, and they inspired stories of shinigami, valkyries, grim reapers, etc. and Darcy in particular was the inspiration for the Morrigan.
> 
> Also, I refuse to acknowledge Frigga's death in Thor 2. Why'd they have to kill off such a bamf woman? Lame.


	12. Chapter 12

“I… I what?”

“Whose memories are they?  Bucky’s?” Steve asks.

“I cannot see them, I can only tell that Darcy carries them,” Frigga demures.  “Did you know, Cousin, that you carried them?”

“I told Bucky that I’d hold them for him,” she says slowly.  “Until it was safe for him to have them again.  But I didn’t know I was actually holding  _ his _ memories; I thought I was just remembering them for him.”

“The spells cast unknowingly by a loving heart are often the strongest magic,” Frigga says with a small smile tucked into the corner of her mouth.

“So what does this mean?  Can Darcy give the memories back to Bucky?” Steve wants to know.

“She already has been,” Frigga says.  “I can sense the connection, though it has been damaged somehow, recently.”

“The triggers,” Darcy says quietly.  “They… the people who burned the memories from him, that hurt him, they programmed triggers into him.  When they use one, it restructures his mind.”

The expression of Frigga’s face doesn’t really change, but Darcy suddenly feels like the woman is much more dangerous than she’d previously thought, that the beautifully wrought armor of her outfit is not just decorative and has seen use.  The Queen of Asgard asks in a deceptively mild voice: “This Midgardian, Bucky, he has been injured with mind magic?”

“Yes,” Darcy says.

“The practice of such  _ seidr  _ is closely monitored in Asgard, since injuries caused by its misuse as so grievous.  And you tell me that Midgardians have discovered it, and have used it to deliberately twist a person?” Frigga’s face is lines of ice and stone, the cold disapproval and banked fury enough to make all of them lower their eyes; even her son Thor.  “This will not stand.  Take me to this man.”

“You’re going to help him?  Bucky?” Steve asks, hope alight in his face.

“I shall,” Frigga says, and makes a gesture that manages to be both imperious and a polite request.  Steve obliges her, leading the way down to the cell block where Bucky still lies insensate.  Darcy follows, trailing behind with Thor.  He moves with power and a mantle of confident authority, and Darcy feels very small beside him.

“You should not worry,” he tells her suddenly, voice a low rumble as they stride down the halls after Steve and Frigga.  Darcy looks up at him, startled.  She had not expected him to speak.  His eyes are calm and gentle when he looks down at her.  “My mother is very skilled at the  _ seidr  _ of healing.  She will set your heart’s match to rights.”

Darcy bites her lip, knowing she should be reassured by his confidence, but unable to stop the sparks of fear and  _ what-if _ that fizz in her blood.  She can’t even muster the embarrassment that yet another person has seen what she’s been too stupid to see herself—that she loves Bucky.

Maybe it is because she loves him that she can’t help but fear for him, worry that even Frigga’s power won’t be enough to save him.

She offers a slightly watery smile to Thor, and then follows Frigga and Steve through the door into Bucky’s cell.

He’s still on the cot where Steve had left him, of course, unconscious under the geas of the trigger she’d used.  His face is smoothly expressionless, asleep.  No stubbornly set jaw or furrowed brow.  His eyelashes lay over the almost bruise-like shadows under his eyes.  His body is lax, but the muscled bulk of it somehow still manages to set off warnings— _ dangerous.  This one is dangerous. _

Frigga goes to his side, and lays a gentle hand across his forehead.  Her focus visibly turns inward, her face serious.  Steve opens his mouth to say something, but a gesture from Thor has him closing it wordlessly.  They watch, Thor calmly, Steve and Darcy anxiously.

After a long moment, Frigga removed her hand and looked at them.  “Come here, Darcy.”

She steps forward, reluctantly tearing her attention from Bucky to Frigga.  The Asgardian Queen holds out a hand, a slight smile on her face.  Darcy reaches out, their hands sliding together palm to palm.  The touch seems to spark against her, like static, and Frigga gently presses against Darcy’s hand, unobtrusively directing her to stand right beside Bucky.  “It’s time for you to return those memories.  You have carried them honorably; your vigil is at an end.”

Darcy’s heart trips in her chest.  “How do I give them back?”

“You merely must touch him,” Frigga responds.  “I have opened the way with  _ seidr _ .”

She hesitates slightly, the action seeming so small for so large a thing.  She almost fears that it will not work, but she trusts Frigga.  Darcy leans over Bucky to cup his cheek tenderly with one hand.  Again, the contact seems charged in some way, nearly imperceptible.  She strokes Bucky’s cheek, feeling the light scrape of his slight stubble.  She can feel his slow, calm breaths against her wrist where it hovers close to his mouth.  Staring down at him, something crystallizes in her chest.   _ I love him.  I do.  Very much. _

“I can wake him now, if you wish,” Frigga says.

“Is it… is it safe?” Steve asks.  “HYDRA, they… made him attack us, before Darcy put him to sleep.”

“I have cleared their perversions from his mind, do not fear,” Frigga says.  “He will never be theirs again; their words will not twist him any longer.”

Darcy hears Steve take a ragged breath, but she can’t look away from Bucky.  “Please,” she whispers.

“Yes,” Steve agrees, voice hoarse.  Frigga lays her hand over Darcy’s on Bucky’s face, and his eyelashes flutter.  The part to reveal sleep-hazy blue eyes, pupils contracting to adjust to the lights in the room.  He focuses on Darcy, and a smile slowly washes over his face.

“Hey Darce,” he says, voice just as sleep-muddled.  Frigga moves away, allowing them their reunion.  Darcy opens her mouth, but only a sob comes out.  “Hey, hey, doll, none o’ that. C’mon.”

He sits up and pulls her against his chest, shushing her as her tears overflow.  It’s silly, because she’s not sad—she’s  _ so happy _ —but the tears keep falling and she can’t speak through the hiccuping sobs.  She clings to him, feeling him press his face into her hair.

“God damn, Darcy,” he breathes.  “I’m… I feel… I can  _ remember _ .  I remember everything.”

She manages to force out his name between heaving breaths.  His hand passes through her hair soothingly.  “It’s fine, you’re fine, sweetheart.  Jesus, Darcy.   _ Thank you _ .  You saved me.”

Oh  _ no _ , why would he say that?  She wails, a fresh wave of tears flooding her.  “Why’re you—?  Ah, Darce, please stop crying?  I didn’t mean ta make you cry.”

“I think she’s just happy,” Steve’s voice filters through to Darcy’s ears.  She feels Bucky shift, probably to look up at his old friend.  

“Stevie.”  Bucky’s voice is a tangle of emotions.  “Shit, punk.  I—I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t you fucking  _ dare _ , you jerk,” Steve growls, but he sounds a little teary, too.  “It’s not your fault.  None of it’s your fault.  I’m just glad to have you b-back.”

His voice breaks a little, and Darcy can feel Bucky’s breath hitch a little in his chest.  “You stupid punk,” he says very quietly.  “I  _ shot at you.   _ I shot your friend.”

“And I got you blasted off a train and down a mountainside,” Steve retorts.  Bucky huffs.

“Hardly your fault; you weren’t behind the trigger.”

“Neither of you have anything to apologize for,” Darcy says, voice nasally in the wake of her tears.  “Neither of you failed the other in any way.  Lay the blame and the hurts at the feet of those whose fault it really is: HYDRA.”

Bucky’s grip on her shifts.  “You okay now, doll?”

She peels her head away from his shoulder, sniffling.  “I got your shirt all wet.”

“Don’t worry ‘bout it.  You okay?” he persists.  She nods.

“Steve’s right,” she says, meeting Bucky’s gaze.  “I’m just really happy.”

Bucky untangles his hand from her hair, and cups her cheek in an unconscious reciprocation of the way she’d caressed him.  His eyes are bright, face open with wonder.  “This is amazing,” he says.  “I can  _ think _ .  I can remember.  It’s not just all noise and static, drowning me.”

She hadn’t know it’d been so bad for him.  Darcy touches the tips of her fingers to his cheekbone, staring back at him.  Steve coughs lightly, drawing them both out of an intense gaze.  The Captain has a slant to the corner of his mouth that is amused and apologetic as he tips his head ever so slightly to direct their attention to Thor and Frigga, standing together and watching the proceedings with indulgent smiles.

“Thank you, ma’am, for everything you did to bring me back,” Bucky says, somehow recognizing Frigga’s involvement in his recovery.  “I can never pay you back.”

“The satisfaction of a healed patient is all the award I need,” Frigga says sincerely.  “And it overjoys me to see my cousin so happy.”

Bucky blinks.  “Your cousin?  Darcy?”

“I’ll explain later,” she promises.  “But I know what I am now.”

“Oh.”  The light in Bucky’s eyes dims a little, and he becomes a little wary.  “Does that mean… Can she fix what Pierce did to you?”

Darcy wraps her arms a little tighter around him and shakes her head.  “I don’t want to go back to what I was.  I won’t.  I want to stay here with you.”

She squeaks as he crushes her to him suddenly.  “Thank god,” he breathes.  “I want you to stay, Darcy.  Always.  I want to always be able to hold you like this.”

She snuggles into his arms, incandescently happy.

Steve coughs again, a little more pointedly.  Frigga has a spark of mischief in her eyes as Darcy and Bucky once again turned their attention to the others in the room.  “I am so very glad to have met you Darcy, and to have been able to aid you in healing, James Buchanan Barnes.  I fear that I must take my leave now; I have been too long from Asgard and my duties.”

They stand, and Darcy smiles brilliantly at Frigga.  “Thank you, my Lady Queen.  I am so grateful.”

“Thank you again, ma’am,” Bucky adds.  Steve chips in with his own gratitude, they all make the appropriate farewell gestures, and Steve leaves to escort Thor and Frigga back out.  It leaves Darcy and Bucky alone in the cell, and staring at each other again.

“Everything is so clear,” Bucky breaks the silence first, voice full of marvel.  “I can think.  I know who I am.  I feel so  _ human _ .”

She thinks she knows what he means.  It had been beyond amazing when she had finally been able to interact in the world—with the world, with Bucky—rather than simply drifting and observing.  She’d finally felt real in a way that is hard to explain in words.  She hadn’t really considered that the programming that had muffled  _ Bucky  _ with the  _ Soldier _ had been similar, and that removing it would feel the same.

It’s hard to know what to say.  What is there to say?  Darcy searches for words and can only find an insufficient: “I’m glad.”

Bucky meets her gaze,  _ present  _ behind his eyes in a way he hadn’t been before.  He slowly moves closer, one step, two, three… until he’s right in front of her, and her head is tipped up to continue to hold his gaze.  “Darcy,” he says. He slips a hand across her cheek and into her hair, curving his fingers around the back of her head at the nape of her neck.  His eyes burn into her.  “I want to kiss you.”

Darcy wraps a hand around his wrist.  “Yes.”

She doesn’t understand why it feels so good, to press one’s lips against another’s.  But it makes her heart race and a feeling like bubbles to rise up in her chest.  She never wants him to stop kissing her.

He shudders against her, and breaks away for a moment.  “I’d forgotten what that felt like,” he murmurs against her lips.

“Again,” she pleads, reaching up to grip his shirt with her free hand.  Bucky’s nostrils flare and his pupils dilate, and he obliges.

* * *

It’s hard for Bucky to be around Steve, or anyone, really, beside Darcy.  While Frigga had healed his mind and gave him back the memories he’d lost, he still remembers the Soldier’s memories, too.  He remembers each target, every death he’d dealt.  He remembers fighting with Steve and his allies.

The guilt nearly overwhelms him.

It isn’t all the time; sometimes Bucky is able to smile and laugh, life and mischief lighting his eyes.  But sometimes, everything that he has done and that has been done to him proves too heavy a burden to bear, and he sinks into a dark and hopeless silence.  It’s almost too close to the ice of the Soldier for Darcy to take, but she stays by his side during those times—she is the only one he lets near when they happen.

After about two weeks of bouncing between high and low mental and emotional states, Steve’s friend Sam Wilson had come.  He works with the Department of Veterans Affairs, Steve had said, and can help.  Bucky had been angry and resistant, at first.

“I’m not crazy!” he’d snapped.

“No, you’re not,” Sam had said, while Steve just looked like Bucky’d sucker-punched him.  “But you’re injured.  And dude, I get it, you were a soldier in World War II.  You people treated shell-shock by giving the guy alcohol—which, let me tell you, is all kinds of messed up, it’s the  _ last  _ thing you want to do—or telling him to toughen up.  Guys who didn’t were called cowards.  But we understand it a bit more these days.  We have things that can help.  Treatments.”

“Drugs won’t work on me,” Bucky’d said coldly.  “The serum burns through them too fast.”

“Not necessarily drugs,” Sam’d replied.  “Though I wouldn’t count those out; we’ve got some serious brains working with us who might be able to formulate something.  But no.  I was talking about therapy.  Things we’ve figured out to teach trauma survivors how to cope.”

Bucky had capitulated, in the end.  The combined efforts of Darcy, who had gripped his hand and whispered “If this will make you well, would it be so bad?”, and Steve, who had admitted that he’d attended numerous VA meetings to get his own head on straight.

“You…?” Bucky’d stared.

“Survivor’s guilt,” Steve had muttered, looking away from him.  Bucky’s entire face had twitched, and he’d gone silent.  A couple long moments later, he’d agreed to talk to Sam.

That had been three weeks ago, and Bucky now seems content with the arrangement.  He is calmer, certainly, and when the lows happen, he knows how to walk himself through them, knows how to keep from spiralling lower.  The techniques Sam had taught him don’t always work, but he knows he has a support net when they don’t.  He knows he can come to Darcy, Steve, or Sam.

They all have stayed in the bunker where they’d first woken up, though now they stay in the barracks a floor above the containment cells they’d woken up in.  It turns out that it is a SHIELD bunker; though SHIELD technically has disbanded in the wake of what had occurred in DC, elements of the organization still linger, and Captain America had called in a favor from one of them.  The bunker is theirs, to use as they will for as long as they will.

Darcy isn’t sure what the plan is, if they have a plan.  Nothing has been said, certainly.  No offers for what comes after, no mention of giving SHIELD back their bunker and moving on elsewhere.  She doesn’t think they plan to stay here indefinitely, but she doesn’t think they have a plan to do otherwise, either.  Steve seems a little bit at a loss as well, wandering the bunker and spending hours upon hours in the training gyms, burning off energy.

In the end, Bucky is the one to suggest a plan.  Or, more accurately, announce a plan.

“I want to fight,” he says, jaw firm.  “Like you do.  To help people.  To atone.”

“With… with the Avengers?” Steve asks, after a startled pause.  Bucky nods tersely.

“You know you have nothing to atone for, Bucky?” Darcy asks.  “You don’t have to keep fighting.  If you never want to pick up a gun again…”

“This is the right thing to do,” Bucky says firmly.  “I never wanted to join the Army either, to fight in the war, but that was the right thing to do, too.”

Steve is chewing his lip.  “If this is what you really want… Then I’ll speak to the others.  I can’t promise what they’ll say.  There are… circumstances that might make this difficult.”

Bucky’s expression doesn’t waver from the flint-hard stoicism setting it into sharp lines.  “They might not want to work with someone like me.  An enemy.”

“No, it’s not…” Steve starts and stops.  Sighs.  “In a way, I guess.”

Bucky nods.  “I’ll fight alone if I need to, but I… If I’m following you, I know I’m doing the right thing.”

Darcy bites her lip against the tears that suddenly well in her eyes.  A muscle in Steve’s jaw jumps and it takes him a moment to respond.  “You won’t have to be alone.  If it comes down to it, I will always fight with you.  But Bucky, like Darcy said… you don’t have to do this.”

“It will make me… feel better,” Bucky says, a little stilted.  He still has issues talking about emotions, because for so long he hadn’t been allowed to have them.  “I’m not… I didn’t want to do what I have done, but I did it.  I helped build HYDRA up.  Now I want to help tear them down.”

Steve hesitates once more, sharing a glance with Darcy—they had grown to be friends in the weeks prior— before he nods.  “Okay.  I’ll talk to the others.”

Two days later, she and Bucky are awakened by the sound of shouting down the hall from their shared room.  They are up immediately, Darcy first by virtue of the fact she’d been using Bucky’s human pectoral as a pillow.  She bursts through the door, as Bucky hisses: “Darcy!  Wait!”

She stops, not because of him, but because of the sight that greets her at the end of the hall.  Steve is there, arguing with a dark-haired man in a gleaming suit of red and gold.  Iron Man.  Tony Stark.

“—know what he fucking did, Rogers!” Stark is saying, clearly furious.  He’s right up in Steve’s face, and both of them are flushed in anger.

“If you read the file I sent you, then you  _ also _ know they  _ made  _ him do it,” Steve snaps back.

“Bullshit,” Stark sneers.  “He gave in—”

Steve takes a step closer, their chests nearly touching, and the physical threat palpable.  He looms over the shorter man, and his voice is deadly quiet when he says: “I understand you were in Afghanistan for three months, in the hands of the Ten Rings.  They tortured you to persuade you to make them a bomb.  How long did the torture last before you told them you would?”

“But I didn’t, I made the suit instead—” Stark begins.

“How.  Long.” Steve reiterates, words punching through the air coldly.  Stark stares at him a beat before replying.

“A week.”

“A week,” Steve says.  “Now, imagine if the torture went for longer.  A month.  A year.  But they’re not asking you to do anything.  They’re torturing because it’s the torture they’re interested in.  The torture is just a side-effect of the experiments they’re doing.  Imagine if this lasts for a year.  A decade.  Imagine if they torture you for  _ seventy years _ , with their only intent that the pain drives  _ you  _ out of your mind so that they can put  _ something else  _ in there instead.  How would you have faired, Stark?”

The other man opens his mouth to reply, but Steve bulldozes right over him.  “Your weapons killed thousands.  They used to call you the Merchant of Death.  But you realized the impact of what you’d been blindly doing, and took up the task of making things right.  You became Iron Man.  What gives you the right to do so, and not Bucky?”

Darcy sees Stark’s jaw clench so hard that muscles stand out and parts of the flesh go white with the constricture.  He glares at Steve, eyes blazing.  “Fine.   _ Captain _ .  Just keep him the fuck away from me.”

He turns to leave, but that brings Darcy and Bucky into his line of sight, and he realizes they are there, and who they are.  His eyes widen, then narrow in the most potent hatred Darcy’s seen.  It has her stepping slightly in front of Bucky and mantling her wings in warning.  Stark’s attention shifts to her, his narrowed eyes catching on her wings, then her face.  He glares, but doesn’t say anything, or do anything besides to stalk stiffly away.  They all stand still and silent until the sound of his boots clanging on the floor fades.  Then, Steve sighs and seems to slump.

“Sorry,” he says, passing a hand through his hair.  “That was…”

“I’m not surprised,” Bucky says quietly.  “I killed his parents.  I’m not surprised he hates me.  It’s okay.”

“It’s not, really.  I mean, it’s fine he’s mad, but he’s mad at the wrong person.”

Bucky shrugs a little.  “I’m the best target for his anger.  It was my hands that did it.”

Steve scowls.  Darcy rustles her wings as they smooth back against her shoulder blades.  “He’ll come around,” she says.  “He knows you’re right.  It’s why he didn’t argue.  He’s too smart to hold onto this anger for too long.”

“I hope you’re right,” Steve sighs.

“It will be okay,” Darcy insists.

“What about the others?” Bucky asks Steve.

“The others?”

“I gather Stark was here because you’d contacted him about me, about adding me to your squad.  I assume you also contacted the other Avengers at the same time?”

“Oh, yeah.  Everyone else was more accepting.  But then, it wasn’t personal for any of them, not the way it is for Tony.”

Bucky frowns and his eyes drop to the floor.  “So how will this work?  I won’t let you force him to work with me.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Steve replies easily.  “There’s nothing on the horizon that might require all of us working in one unit; teams of three or four have been sufficient for what challenges we’ve faced recently.  We’ll just work it so that you and Tony are never working the same mission.  And if anything does come up that requires all of us to assemble, it will be a threat large enough that any personal issues will take a backseat to dealing with it.”

Bucky nods, but his expression remains bleak.  Darcy slips her hand into his.  Steve eyes his friend a moment, then says, slowly: “It might not be my place to tell you this, but… Natasha has a history similar to yours.  She was brought up in the Red Room—”

Bucky’s head comes up, clearly recognizing the name, but he doesn’t interrupt as Steve continues.

“—and worked for them for some time.  Something changed; I have never asked what.  She brought down the Room, and struck out on her own.  In the end, Hawkeye brought her in to SHIELD.  She joined.  When she talks about it, she says she has a lot of red in her ledger, and she’s working to clear it.

“And Clint… When Loki tried to subjugate the world with an alien army, he took a couple of ours, used some sort of magic to make them follow him.  Clint also knows what it’s like to be used, and to wake up from it with blood on your hands.”

“They understand, so they’re supporting Bucky’s joining?” Darcy asks.  Steve nods.

“And you already met Thor.  And Bruce… the Hulk, he has some empathy of his own.  They all support both you and Bucky joining the crew.”  Steve clasps a hand to Bucky’s shoulder.  “You’re not alone, Buck.  Even if Tony never makes peace with your history, the rest of us have your back.”

Some of the lines around Bucky’s eyes smooth, the tense line of his mouth softening.  “What about you?”

“Even if the others didn’t welcome you, I’d be with ya, Buck,” Steve says.  “You gotta know that.  To the end of the line.”

“To the end of the line,” Bucky echoes quietly.  Darcy squeezes his hand.

“So what do you think?” Steve asks with a crooked smile.  “You ready to follow Captain America into the jaws of death?”

Bucky huffs, recognizing the question.  A thin smile plays across his mouth.  “Nah.  That skinny kid from Brooklyn, too dumb to run from a fight.  I’m following him.”

Steve laughs, a complicated sound, part relief, part joy, and part regret.  He tugs Bucky into a rough hug, careful not to knock his and Darcy’s clasped hands.  “Glad you’re back, Buck.”

“Good to be home, Stevie,” Bucky replies hoarsely.  Darcy sighs, warmth and relief flooding her chest.

They are home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the end! Thanks everyone for joining me on this little jaunt. I'm grateful for the response I've gotten; you're all awesome.
> 
> I was going to have an explanation for Darcy's name, but it never quite fit into the narrative. The reason she chose Darcy as her name is related to her being the Morrigan. One of the origins for the name Darcy (besides the French d'Arcy) is a permutation of the Gaelic name Dorcha, 'dark one'.
> 
> Thanks again, e'rrybody.


End file.
